The Mummy Returns

An overblown, mostly ineffective sequel, The Mummy Returns follows Brendan Fraser’s Rick and Rachel Weisz’s Evelyn as they’re forced to once again save the world after Arnold Vosloo’s nefarious Imhotep is resurrected by a power-hungry Egyptian cult. It’s hard to deny that The Mummy Returns gets off to an entertaining, exciting start, as writer/director Stephen Sommers does a superb job of immediately cultivating a promisingly old-fashioned atmosphere – with the picture boasting an engaging prologue, featuring the origin story of Dwayne Johnson’s Scorpion King, that leads into a solid opening stretch reintroducing Fraser and Weisz’s affable protagonists (as well as their young son, Freddie Boath’s Alex). There’s little doubt, then, that the movie slowly-but-surely wears out its welcome as it progresses into its increasingly frantic (and frenetic) midsection (which is too bad, certainly, given that Sommers has admittedly peppered the narrative with a handful of genuinely spellbinding sequences), with The Mummy Returns‘ second half dominated by CGI-heavy set-pieces that are hardly able to pack the exhilarating punch Sommers is obviously striving for (ie many such moments feel as though they’d be more at home within a video game cut-scene, ultimately). By the time the dispiritingly over-the-top climax rolls around, which features a chintzy and hilariously unconvincing computer-generated Scorpion King running amok, The Mummy Returns has secured its place as a needlessly excessive followup that is, disappointingly (and for the most part), lacking in smaller, character-based moments in between the myriad of action interludes.

** out of ****