The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

(2008)

For a kid's movie




My Personal Review

Short
Though the movie is ridiculous at times and generally silly all around, it serves to be entertating for anyone who knows what to expect (aka. don’t go in expecting an Oscar winner). The third movie in the "Mummy" series suffers from being slightly…stupidier than its predecessors, and completely abuses Chineese history. With these major considerations aside, the film is laden with enough special affects and childish comedy to serve as an entertaining Tuesday or Wednesday night for the family. But it would be best enjoyed if it costs you no money to see (aka. watch it on TV).

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Full

Another installment of "The Mummy" that follows the trend of getting worse with each successive film. Though I would argue that the first "Mummy",despite being ridiculous and stupid at times, was very entertaining, I can not say the same about the third movie. With a switch in directors, the translation of the film's style is noticeable. The movie tries to be the same, silly good time as its predecessors, but it seems more like a familiar, dumb waste of time. You can also tell that the production crew picked a mummy from ancient China so that they could hop on the 'kung fu train' like all current movies. I like kung fu, but it is so poorly done in this film that you wish they hadn’t even made the attempted.

The plot
A mummy from a contrived history of China is awaken by the O’ Connells. And as usual the unstoppable force of the mummy will consume the world. That is of course if Brendan Fraser isn’t there to save the day. From the moment the mummy is awaken, we follow the characters on a series of quests to prevent the mummy from becoming all powerful. Can Brendan save the world...again?

Reasons to see it
Special effects are always fun no matter what context they are in. And this film boasts enough to make me question the economics behind funding movies in Hollywood. Though the visuals do often make you feel like you are watching a cartoon, they are definitely necessary for the movie to maintain your attention (a sign of poor script design).
Also…Umm…I guess that’s it.

The Negatives
The acting is atrocious. Though it wasn’t very notable in the previous films, I just felt that I should mention it here as well.

The characters seem bored of this trilogy, which really shows in some of the tired dialogue. Unfortunatly the boredom is contagious and even though you haven’t seen the movie before, you feel bored too. It made me feel like I had seen the movie but just couldn’t quite predict what would happen next. Weird. This is a classic mistake of not knowing when to stop a fanchise.

The dialogue is poorly written. Though it is possible that the bad acting makes the dialogue seem worse than it is, i'm gonna say that factor only contributes 30%. The rest is just bad writing. The endless phrases of , “the mummy must not be awaken or the whole world will be in danger”, “he must not make it to the mountain, or no one will be safe” becoming extremely annoying. These phrases are hopelessly vague, and no one really seems to know what a mummy would do to the world if unchecked--we didn’t find out in the previous films and you definitely won’t find out here. All we know is that they must be stopped or “all will be lost.”

The lack of a solid plot and the lack of an attempt to pretend that there is one. The movie is a series of childish, special effects driven, action sequence one right after the next. There isn’t even a façade of story depth (something we saw in the second "Mummy"). The jokes are terrible too. I don’t even know if kids would laugh at them.
Also, the soundtrack is no good.

In summary…
...this movie is very silly, but can be a good time for anyone who has nothing else to do. I mean, absolutely nothing else to do.