I want my Munny Returned. [No hard feelings.]

Rating: Null/10 (8 October 2001)

Because no matter how sore my frontal intellect lobes were, or the sorry state of my insulted reasoning in forming realistic maniacism, you've gotta give it up to Stephen "Indian" Sommers for pumping out an unbelievable success story. His two Mummy movies put out as threateningly terrific marketeering ploys of sucking out America's millions under the front of an effervescent little action movie.
Mummy 1 was incredibly fun, no matter how the more pompous of the deployed critic army had hailed otherwise. It was a great resurrection of the light-hearted comedy farce centered around historical trumps from the same gene pool as Indiana Jones. (Or else a determined remake justified through better available special-effects/face-lift technology.) And it worked. We had a laugh. Universal made some money. And life went on.
But there is something fishy about Mummy 2. A little TOO eager to please, this sequel. More like a specifically precisioned beast of translucence based on randomly selected telephone surveys to anonymous people about what the studio needs to do to get a rise out of & get this potential movie goer to see this thing on opening day. Obviously that Oded Fehr guy was a big hit with the ladies, since he had a bucketful of these Fabioesque, heartthrob man-meat promo shots for tall dark and handsome Arabian GQ. They porked it up with flashbacks of that ever-clichÃ© Ancient Egypt gold chantilly Renaissance paradise, as well as fight scenes with sci-fi creations of an obvious 3D computer-generated quality.
It WAS pretty. But it was also pretty confusing and pretty ugly in the IQ department. You can almost see this thing being written for the theater reaction -- where swashbuckler searches in dank cave but finds nothing, then a loud boom accompanies the "turn around and find ogre breathing down your back" scare tactic. (Insert popcorn flying towards ceiling here.) Although, the Virilliant Vosloo not only looks believable as a 21st Century Boris Karloff, he's a good sport with stage directions that must have looked humiliating in real time AND he milked some sympathy out of the audience at the end by shedding a few trick tears...dare I say triple threat? Dennis the Menace had at least some sort of listless command, and the end was on the brink of sheer excitement.
But like a drunk girl, Mummy 2 was just too goddamn easy. No sport in watching it take any chances...just another air-headed run around.