This one should have stayed buried

Rating: 3/10 (4 May 2001)

To start off, let me just say that I was a HUGE fan of the first film. It was smart, funny, and action packed. Unquestionably one of the best films in the genre since they stopped making Indiana Jones flicks. The Mummy Returns, while containing wall to wall action and some definitely cool fight sequences, lacks the feel of the original. The movie tries desperately to recapture the fun of the original, and falls miserably on it's face. I remember the first movie being very funny, and never taking itself too seriously. I laughed probably 3 times in this movie, and the rest of the jokes were incredibly corny 1 liners that no one in the theater over the age of 12 laughed at. I'm not gonna blame it on the kid, like many others are doing, because there is far more wrong with this movie than him. In fact, I'm not going to blame it on any of the actors. I usually really like Brendan Fraser (And if I liked Dudley Do-Right, I'll like him in anything) but he really didn't have much to work with here. And if you're a WWF fan going to see the movie debut of the Rock, then do yourself a favor and get up and leave 10 minutes into the movie, because he doesn't come back (The character does at the end, but he's completely computer generated). The film just goes from one ridiculously unbelievable adventure to the next, no time to breathe, no time to actually stop and develop the story into something remotely interesting. This movie was obviously rushed into production from the moment the first film became a hit, and if they had just taken half as much time polishing the script as they did filling it up with special effects (varying in range from spectacular to extremely fake looking) then it would have been a much better film. As it stands, it's little more than two hours of pretty scenery, with not much else to keep your interest. Grade: C-