It's as though writer-director Stephen Sommers, also responsible for The Mummy, has taken the original's script and merely deleted every other line simply to shoehorn in more, more, more computer-generated effects, hollow and dim references to a dozen other films (among them the entirety of the Indiana Jones trilogy, Sam Raimi's far superior Army of Darkness, The Matrix, and Star Wars), and a handful of stock characters. Sommers has brought back most of The Mummy's cast (including a woefully wasted John Hannah) and added yet another villain: the Scorpion King, played with sneer and growl by WWF's The Rock, who appears for only a few seconds early on; later, he's entirely computer-generated, down to the scowl -- as though one could actually tell the difference. The entire project so reeks of cynicism, you can smell what The Rock is stepping in.
This isn't filmmaking; it's programming-by-the-numbers, a movie made on a computer in which the actors play fifth fiddle to CGI sandstorms, scarabs, and scary creatures (among them hellhound soldiers, whose appearance makes The Mummy Returns feel like Braveheart as directed by Ray Harryhausen). Fraser, as Rick O'Connell, and Rachel Weisz, as his wife, Evelyn (and, as it turns out, the reincarnated Nefertiti), are just actors reciting lines to each other, not human beings talking to and listening to each other. Their jokes land with a horrific thud in the enormous distance between them, and they never seem to look each other in the eye. And they treat their seven-year-old son, Alex (a young Indiana Jones, played by Freddie Boath, who comes possessing either a British or Midwest accent), like an extra: When he's kidnapped early on by baddies in search of a bracelet that will resurrect the Scorpion King, Rick and Evelyn seem about as concerned as the audience, who know Alex will be rescued well before film's end. Everyone's but a hired hand meant to kill time between explosions and set pieces and battles between the living and the undead. They talk, but say nothing -- except, on occasion, to fill in Sommers's thin outline with tedious bits of exposition explaining where we've been and where we're headed.
It's pointless even to encapsulate the plot, because there isn't much of one. The movie even feels as though it begins in the second reel; if The Mummy was incoherent and rambling, The Mummy Returns is the crazy guy on the corner you try to avoid when crossing the street. It begins and ends in Egypt in 1933 (it's set eight years after the original), takes a side trip to London -- where a fleshless-and-bone Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) is once more resurrected so he can take over the Scorpion King's dog army -- and, like Moses and the Hebrews, spends the rest of the time wandering aimlessly through the desert. There is one brief foray into the jungle, which is a most pleasant diversion, if only because a good chunk of the cast gets annihilated by what appear to be zombie Ewoks (imagine Return of the Jedi written by Oliver Stone).
The Mummy Returns is that sequel that's simply unnecessary, a movie that exists only to taketaketake your long green without giving anything in return. It punishes rather than entertains; it condescends, it offends, it loathes its audience. The Mummy Returns is the very definition of a film that serves only as an advertisement for itself (or the myriad special-edition Mummy multi-DVD sets Universal's currently hawking), because it thinks we have no interest in story or characters; it treats us like infants who only want to see things blow up and catch fire, because we're not smart or developed enough to handle genuine emotion or terror. But maybe Sommers and Universal are right: When The Mummy Returns mints a fortune, we'll no doubt get a third installment in which all the actors are computer-generated, replaced by ones and zeroes. Audiences get what they deserve.
