Great monster movie throwback, fun movie on its own.

Rating: 8/10 (10 May 2004)

I keep seeing bad reviews for this movie, and I can't help but wonder why. I came into the movie expecting the worse. I've been disappointed by movies often lately, and the trailer for this one had all the symptoms. I wasn't even comforted by the fact that it was directed by Stephen Sommers, whose Mummy movies I really liked.
However, I can safely say that I left the movie completely satisfied and my faith in Stephen Sommers as a great "adventure" movie directory has been solidified.
Maybe people are looking to get too much out of this movie - I don't know. I never expected it to be an award winning movie. I just went into it to have fun. I'm a big fan of old monster movies, and this movie has numerous throwbacks to the old movies... I started laughing out loud at a lot of the camera work because it felt so much like a classic monster movie. They did an excellent job at paying tribute to a lot of the classic moments from these movies without obviously straying from the story.
The story was decent to good. There were a lot of elements I liked, but there wasn't a HUGE amount of depth to it (not necessarily a problem, in my eyes). My only real problems with the story were some rather large jumps they did from one scene to another without explaining the events in between very well.
The action was very well done, as was the accompanying computer graphics that made a lot of the scenes possible. The special effects weren't always on par with other recent movies, such as LGX, but they were definitely believable for the most part.
My vote for this movie was 8/10. I think it did what it set out to do - make a movie that paid a tribute to the monster movies of old, while giving audiences a fun filled two hour ride through a large cast of characters. The movie was just the right length, and besides some plot holes and CG problems, I was a happy movie-goer at the end of the experience. If you liked the Mummy, I can definitely recommend this movie.