Meh. Super Lazy Movie

Rating: 3/10 (26 April 2019)

The Mummy was pretty much everything you'd expect out of a light action/adventure movie, which was fun, exciting, with the right doses of humor and wit sprinkled throughout. Simply put - it worked.
I don't exactly know what they were going for with The Mummy Returns, but I don't think there was really a ton of effort put into this movie at all, especially from a writing standpoint. I imagine one of the early production meetings went like this:
"Let's take the heroes and villains from the first movie and have them go at it again, but this time throw a kid in the mix. And near the end of the movie we can introduce a new villain* for about 3 minutes. Oh, and let's throw in a rocket powered hot air balloon just for the hell of it."
* = Is the Scorpion King actually a villain? Because in the stand alone Scorpion King movie, he was definitely the hero.
To me, this movie felt like it was thrown together with little prep work and was really only done so that The Rock/Dwayne Johnson could get started on his movie career. I remember the pre-movie hype about him "starring" in it and then you watch it and find out it's basically just a CGI Rock near the end of the movie and he doesn't speak.
The Mummy Returns doesn't really do much at all in terms of advancing character development of returning characters from the original and it doesn't tell a significantly new or different story. It might be one of the most pointless movies I've ever seen.