Cinema | Bury It: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor leaves The Mummy’s charm dead in the dust. 

But even with the bar set low and my unconditional love set high, I cannot freakin’ believe how cruelly Tomb rips out my geeky little heart and stomps on it. All the magic, all the life has been surgically excised from this charmless exercise in overblown action that is utterly clueless about how overblown-actiony it is. With the 1999 film, Sommers gave us a wonderfully cheeky, smartly snarky sendup of action comedies that was also itself a wildly fun example of the genre. But you can’t even point to Tomb as the kind of thing that Sommers was toying with, because this new flick utterly fails to realize it’s riddled with clichés and hence also fails to understand that clichés do actually serve storytelling purposes. If you’re going to steal, do something with your ill-gotten gains. Don’t just stand there gawping at your stolen treasure.

And so as Tomb opens—setting the stage in ancient China with an evil emperor (Jet Li) who desires immortality so that he can conquer the whole world—we have Michelle Yeoh’s witch informing us in voiceover that we’re about to see a mythic battle between good and evil. In those words, with no hint that anyone involved—director Rob Cohen, or screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar—appreciates that unless this kind of thing needs to be offered with a soupçon of snappy irony. The Mummy winked at this kind of thing; Tomb doesn’t even know that it’s something to be winked at.

That attitude should have been stolen from the earlier films, but it was left on the vault floor in favor of ripping off simple plot points, which only emphasizes the lack of imagination at play here. The emperor gets pissed off because his general (Russell Wong) dares to steal the witch from him, after the emperor had decreed that no man but he would touch her—just like all the stuff with Imhotep and the pharaoh’s concubine that got the plot rolling in 1999. The witch cursed the emperor, and he and his army turn into those famous terra cotta statues you’ve seen pictures of and are buried for all eternity, or at least until Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his family can dig him up.

I would have thought that Gough and Millar—who wrote Spider-Man 2 and Shanghai Noon, the latter of which shares a certain tone with the 1999 film—would be the perfect team to write a Mummy movie, but no. All they’ve done is lift parts of the story from the previous films and from the Indiana Jones saga, with one puzzle piece early in the movie that they found in the Well of the Souls and one plot “twist” later that is an embarrassingly direct theft from The Last Crusade. Everything else is forced and awkward, like the relationship between Rick and Evelyn O’Connell (Maria Bello, who cannot, alas, adequately stand in for Weisz) and their son, Alex (Luke Ford)—though this could perhaps be blamed on the fact that the poor kid has aged 20 years since the last film. He’s supposed to be 19, but looks and acts 30.

Small comfort can be found, I suppose, in the fact that we cannot hear half the dialogue over the racket of the incoherent action sequences. Which is a bit of a surprise, since Cohen has previously given us movies that are, while stupid, at least entertainingly stupid—Stealth, The Fast and Furious. Perhaps the director realized how un-entertainingly stupid the Tomb script was, and choose to try to bury it under video-game CGI, replacing the beautiful painterly CGI of the earlier films. He doesn’t quite succeed in that attempt, but that’s probably his smallest crime here.

THE MUMMY: TOMB OF THE DRAGON EMPEROR

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