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The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

Wow. How can you take a franchise as good as the resurected Mummy and pretty much destroy it in 112 minutes?

Could it be the completely miss cast replacements? Maria Bello was no Rachel Weisz. Luke Ford just wasn’t interesting. Perhaps thats part of it too. I know Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, Michelle Yeoh, Jet Li and David Calder all have something they can do on screen but they were criminaly wasted on this outing. John Hannah and Brendan Fraser certainly pulled it off in the previous films too so maybe it was the flat dialogue, the forced jokes, the hackey attempts at character development and the poor editing. It took three lines of dialogue to say what Brendan Fraser said in the middle line which amounted to lets go and get on a plane illustrated just how baddly the script needed work. It kept hitting duff notes. Which brings me to my next gripe – possibly the worst score for a film I can remember where someone had spent time and money to add music. It was distracting, it didn’t fit. The score from the Mummy lifted the film. This was the musical equivalent of concrete shoes. The opening just dragged and the attempt at a humerous ending was weak beyond words.

The special effects were competent but special effects rarely turn a film into a classic.

Hopefully the Mummy franchise has been laid to rest like the eponymous monster of the title until it can be resurected by someone with an interesting take on it comes along and raises it from the dead again…

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