Stephen Sommers, undisputed king of schlock!

Rating: 3/10 (20 April 2004)

THE MUMMY RETURNS is an orgy of actions, noise and cheap special effects that amount to nothing. Stephen Sommers is THE undisputed king of schlock filmmaking. Unlike movies of the past, when schlocky genre films had small budgets to keep them from going over-the-top with their combination of bad taste, unoriginality and complete lack of understanding of what consists of good writing and acting, Stephen Sommers, thanks to uber desperate Universal pictures, works with unlimited amounts of money to bring his super schlocky vision to the big screen. There's nothing restrained or subtle about his style of filmmaking. If Sommers can have 10,000 extras, why not make it 1,000,000 instead, thanks to (overused) CGI. "More, more, more" is probably Sommers' motto. The end result is a huge pile of melted processed cheese that has very little to do with Egypt, mummies or anything else for that matter.
The funniest scene in this action/horror/fantasy/romance/special effects (you can add more slashes to it if you want to) orgy is when the four mummies go through the wall of the museum in London. These mummies are so strong that they can actually go through super thick brick walls of a Victorian building and yet the director has Brendan Fraser destroy them with a shotgun. I'm sure that if Brendan would point his shotgun at the brick walls of the museum, that there'd be very little damage to the walls. The whole scene is totally illogical and always makes me laugh out loud. Ah, that kooky Stephen Sommers.
If you're in the mood for schlock, THE MUMMY RETURNS (or any other Sommers movies) will satisfy you and then some. But if you're looking for any quality filmmaking, well, you'll be sorely disappointed by it.