Don't be fooled by all the noise

Rating: 3/10 (14 May 2001)

Don't be fooled by all the noise: this sequel is a mess. Very few genuine thrills and not a single good scare (or laugh for that matter), but crammed with computer generated special effects that - surprise - look like nothing more than computer generated special effects. Some of these look cheap and hastily thrown together, especially those involving the growth and later destruction of an oasis. Others, like the many shots of marauding hordes crossing the desert, already feel old hat. This does not bode well for the future of cgi-generated armies.
This movie steals from everywhere: Brendan Fraser's Rick O'Connell borrows heavily from Indiana Jones, and the parallel is driven home early on by music that embarrassingly plagiarizes John William's "Indy" theme. There are also a number of strained references to the prior Mummy film, for example, when O'Connell's overly-precocious young son causes the pillars in a tomb to tumble down in a domino effect, it takes awhile to realize this is a joke, one that hearkens back to the first film when his mother (Rachel Weisz) similarly destroys a research library.
This is the kind of movie where the good guys survive impossible odds because the bad guys are bad shots (or swordsmen, in this case). Three different times - once on foot and twice in an airship - the heroes out race rushing water. "It's just fun!" people say. "It's supposed to be a cartoon." Yet fantasy without internal logic is boring. Somehow by the end of the film, not only does it seem that all the actors have been under utilized, but so has our time.