just when did Stephen Sommers get a lobotomy...?

Rating: Null/10 (15 May 2004)

Watching The Mummy again after sitting through Van Helsing really makes you wonder exactly what Stephen Sommers is thinking these days... How on earth could someone responsible for an imaginative, witty script and sympathetic characters 5 years ago have descended to the level of Van Helsing today?
The answer, I'd imagine, is that he's had obscene amounts of money thrown at him to make Van Helsing, so the dire end result shouldn't really be surprising. What is surprising is that the huge budget couldn't stretch to making the CGI even as good as the 1999 original... that's worrying, more than anything, considering that most of the film is computer generated.
What we're left with is Hugh Jackman suffering a sudden charisma bypass (didn't see that one coming!) the moment he got those stupid hair extensions. Kate Beckinsdale, meanwhile, had a chance to prove that Underworld was no one-off - she has now lost any acting ability she once had, and I spent most of the film wondering how she could breathe in that ridiculous corset. Does she even read the scripts herself these days? Amazing how a cursed Rumanian gypsy princess manages to be a less exciting character than Rachel Weisz's daffy librarian, but the difference is that Evie had brains and a cute grudge against the Benbridge Scholars. Anna has a creaky 'concept', an extremely dodgy accent, a rather unconvincing way with a sword and by all rights should get killed off within 5 minutes of her character being introduced. Shame.
The script is banal at best - David Wenham's lapsed friar, Carl, gets all the best lines, and very slim pickings they are. The days of Sommer's wisecracking hero seem awfully long ago, as Jackman just sleepwalks his way through the unfunny moments he does have. Added to the zero chemistry between him and Kate Beckinsdale and I was wanting to either fall asleep or walk out (it was a late showing!) every time either of them was onscreen. That would be nearly every scene, then...
The plot doesn't even bear thinking about - it certainly owed nothing to logic, reason or good storytelling. Aside from the camp black and white prologue - which raises a faint smile - and a sumptuously produced ballroom scene (choreographed a la Cirque du Soleil), there a no 'wow' moments. Not at all. The film has been CGI'd to death at heart - which was sadly the way The Mummy Returns was headed, but at least that inherited decent characters to buoy it up.
It's hard to convey exactly how mind-numbingly awful Van Helsing is. Unfunny, tedious and essentially heartless, not even the added pathos of Frankenstein's monster can redeem it. It would seem Sommers has followed the Wachowskis and George Lucas down the road of forgetting how to write, direct or cast convincingly the moment they hit the big time.