OxfordPress.com

Grade: C+

Verdict: You want fries with that?

Details: Starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. Directed by Stephen Sommers. Rated PG-13 for adventure action and violence. Two hours, 5 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: Hold on to your popcorn bucket, people, because that evil, dead-fleshed hunk Imhotep is definitely back in "The Mummy Returns."

Hollywood's latest Happy Meal, the sequel to 1999's chunk-of-change-making "The Mummy" ($401.9 million worldwide at last count) is a G-force ride that kicks off in 3067 B.C. and rushes into the 20th century, never once stopping to catch its breath.

It's wackier than "Wild, West West." Less shallow than "Hollow Man." And as packed with overdone, lifeless computer effects as any moment in "Star Wars: Episode I--the Phantom Menace."

Heck, we'd say it's better than "Cats," but there are a slew of folks who'd swear the silly thing is "Cats." Who could argue?

Rated a kid-safe PG-13, "The Mummy Returns" is a loud, ever-rolling, simplistic wallop of a movie. It has as many villains as heroes, masses of armies wider than the Sahara, bloodless hand-to-hand combat, buckets o' tommy gun bullets, a wisecracking 8-year-old boy, cat-fighting women and, at least for a while, pro wrestling's the Rock.

Little kids will eat it up. Like cotton candy. The movie will make umpteen millions.

Brendan Fraser returns as Rick O'Connell, the poor man's Indiana Jones, who amid a bunch of ancient Egyptian gobbledygook not only has to try to save his wife (Rachel Weisz, from the first flick) and young son from the clutches of that big, bad mummy Imhotep, he has to face a formidable, bigger and badder foe girded up with computer effects.

This time, Rick is Mr. Cynical, scouring through Egyptian tombs and saying things like, "Sure. Open that up and something bad's gonna pop out." Which it does.

If "The Mummy Returns" has anything, it has boo scares. Loud ones. They lurk all over the place--popping out when you most expect them. If they don't scare you, the noise certainly might. Every sound in this movie rattles like thunder. You've never heard such a commotion when characters wave burning torches through the air in dimly lit tombs or that little kid unclicks the movie's super-secret, whoa-Nellie locked box.

Before you can fathom what this movie is about, there's a rough-and-tumble clash of sword-bearing armies, an underground tidal wave, the rat-a-tat-tat of 1930s machine guns, a "Rosemary's Baby"-ish incantation deep down in a museum, a harrowing bus chase over London Bridge and multiple fistfights. And, gosh, we haven't even gotten close to the balloon ride and the ferocious, skeletal pygmies.

People often like this kind of movie. "Charlie's Angels" sure put a kick into each and every moviegoer's two hours. Catch the ride and fuhgedaboutit.

But "The Mummy Returns" could be so much more.

When the computerized, risen-from-the-dead mummy squad chases our heroes and starts climbing walls, maybe you could start thinking about how much better it was to see live actors doing the same in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."

Maybe you'll start to appreciate Steven Spielberg. How, even when he's dumping all that schmaltz into his movies, he's still making "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "E.T." feel real.

Like its predecessor, "The Mummy Returns" leaps and bounds, jokes and scares, roars and double-roars. And not for a single second does it ever feel real.

— Bob Longino, (none)