Posted on: Friday, May 4, 2001

Movie Scene
At the Movies: `The Mummy Returns'

By David Germain
Associated Press Writer

"The Mummy Returns," a Universal release, is rated PG-13 for adventure action and violence. Running time: 129 minutes. Web site: www.themummy.com

"The Mummy Returns" is at least as big, dumb, corny and overloaded with visual excess as its predecessor.

And like "The Mummy," a surprise hit two years ago, the sequel offers a lot of good-natured fun (he said guiltily).

Never mind that Boris Karloff mustered more chills with a single glance in the 1932 original than these two modern movies can manage with all their computer-generated armies of the dead and other assorted creepy crawlies.

These modern "Mummy" flicks are summer-popcorn fare at its best, or worst: Vapid escapism made palatable by a relentless onslaught of action and imagery and a bunch of likable, lunkheaded heroes.

Set in 1933, eight years after "The Mummy," the sequel reunites the survivors (and decedents) from the first movie.

Adventurous rogue Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) and brainy Egyptologist Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) now are married and living in London with their precocious son Alex (Freddie Boath).

The mummy Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo), dispatched by Rick and Evelyn in the first movie, is resurrected again by evil forces who need him to battle another ancient villain, the Scorpion King (professional wrestling's The Rock, who definitely should not quit his day job).

Seems that if the Scorpion King can be defeated, Imhotep and his gang will gain control of the army of Anubis, an invincible band of werewolflike troops that will allow the mummy to rule the world.

Since that would be bad for the rest of us, the O'Connells, Evelyn's idiot brother Jonathan (John Hannah) and their mysterious guardian angel Ardeth Bay (Oded Fehr) set off again to put all these dead creatures back in their sarcophagi.

Patricia Velasquez, seen briefly in "The Mummy," gets a beefed-up role this time as the blackhearted Anck-Su-Namun, Imhotep's resurrected girlfriend.

Goofy as the plot is, writer-director Stephen Sommers, who also made the first movie, does a nice job hitting the buttons that worked two years ago while ladling on new layers of silliness that should click with the same audience.

We learn secrets about Rick and Evelyn's "destinies." We discover their cosmic connections to Imhotep. We get the lowdown on history's longest-standing cat fight between Evelyn and Anck-Su-Namun.

Unlike so many bratty kids introduced into action franchises, Boath's Alex enhances the cast with cute pluck and humor. Fraser gets to behave a bit more bookishly, while Weisz throws more punches as the old-married O'Connells rub off on each other.

The most refreshing thing about this sequel is that it doesn't try to step back and put the romantic leads at odds the way they were in the first movie. Sommers says he wanted to break that sequel cliche by showing the O'Connells as a couple more in love as the years pass. Nice touch.

By definition of sequel one-ups-manship, Sommers had to outdo "The Mummy" for digitally created monsters. But all the gazillions of giant bugs, jungle dwarves, Anubis warriors and other beasties don't make "The Mummy Returns" a better movie. There's just more of these computer-generated creations running around, faster, louder and, at times, headache-inducing.

If the sequel surpasses the original, it's not for the computer effects. "The Mummy Returns" is at its strongest with some cleverly staged real-world stunts. The computer animation, while impressive, occasionally looks so cartoonish it detracts and distracts from the overall movie.

Maybe it's a case of filmmakers giving the people what they want. Or maybe it's just a case of a reviewer overly fixated on how much creepier Karloff was than a digitized corpse.