More of the same, but one major misstep almost ruined this film for me

Rating: 5/10 (7 June 2017)

Roughly 9 years on from the events of the first film Rick and Evelyn are now married and have an 8 year old son called Alex. Whilst on another one of their archaeological digs they come across the bracelet of Anubis and return it back to their London home. In the meantime another team of explorers find Imhotep's body and raise him from the dead and this team of explorers need this bracelet to control The Scorpion King's army and take over the world. Rick and his team must do everything in their power to stop this rival faction acquiring the bracelet and must once again try to destroy Imhotep.
The Mummy Returns shares a lot of the same qualities as the first film; the tongue-in-cheek humour, goofy charm, and once again the tone is fairly light-hearted and fun. As with the first film, the story is fairly well-paced and moved along fairly well - the only aspect of the story that I wasn't totally impressed with was Imhotep and Anck-Su-Namun's romance which was overused and given a little more focus than I felt was necessary.
The performances were pretty good once again; although the chemistry that Weisz and Fraser shared here wasn't quite as good as it was in the first film - maybe having them as a married couple in this film may have subdued it somewhat. As Alex, Freddie Booth gives a cheeky and fun performance and to his credit he didn't cross that fine line between being funny and annoying which was nice to see. John Hannah was good value here, although again I didn't think he was quite as funny in the second film as he was in the first film.
The only real problem I had with this film lay with the Scorpion King's arrival at the end.... Having seen the real Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson at the start of the film I fully expected to see the real Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson at the end of the film. However, when he does arrive rather than being Dwayne Johnson what we actually get is some kind of horrendous CGI creation of Dwayne Johnson. Why did the filmmakers feel that it was necessary to CGI Dwayne Johnson??? Couldn't they have just superimposed a scorpion's tail and claws/pincers on to his body? I can't imagine that this decision will have gone down well with his fans and I'm sure that the real Dwayne Johnson could have been used at the end as the Scorpion King with some kind of computer wizardry. Personally I thought it just looked naff and it made what should have been a tense final battle look laughable... Imhotep's cowardice at the end only made matters worse. Had the CGI been good then I might have let it slide, but it looked awful and was a misstep in my opinion.
Fortunately, a lot of the fun that was present in the first film is present here which, like the first film, makes this sequel watchable. However, the CGI Dwayne Johnson Scorpion King at the end was awful and almost ruined this film for me, but the key word here is almost.