The Mummy - Tomb of the Dragon Emperor Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

superb.............

this film is the third installment of 'The Mummy' franchise, and doesnot disappoint. This time, the O’Connells must stop a mummy awoken from a 2,000-year-old curse, who threatens to plunge the world into his merciless, unending service.

Doomed by a double-crossing sorceress (played by Michelle Yeoh) to spend eternity in suspended animation, China's ruthless Dragon Emperor and his 10,000 warriors have laid forgotten for centuries, entombed in clay as a vast, silent terracotta army.

But when adventurer Alex O'Connell is tricked into awakening the ruler from eternal sleep, the reckless young archaeologist must seek the help of the only people, who know more than he does about taking down the undead: his parents.

As the Emperor comes back to life, the O'Connell's and Evie's brother Jonathan, find his quest for world domination has only intensified over the millennia.

Striding the Far East with unimaginable supernatural powers, the Emperor Mummy will rouse his legion as an unstoppable, otherworldly force...unless the O’Connells can stop him first.

watch it to find out what happens.

We laughed and we wept - but not in a good way.

The opening 10 minutes of this are excellent and lay out the great premise that the story revolves around. Jet Li is fantastic as ever and he and Brendan Fraser get down to chewing the scenery with their usual gusto. So far so good for the third installment of the tongue in cheek merriment that is the Mummy series.

It starts to go wrong when we discover that Evie has wisely backed out and been replaced by another actress (and apparently learned how to fight rather than being bookish - it's no good doing comedy-absurd fighting when you shown you can actually fight in the previous scene). Evie's replacement and suddenly grown-up adventurer son then proceed to set about the travesty of a script with wooden abandon, hardly seeming to notice the blatant exposition, hammy lines and super-convenient plot twists.

Speaking of the plot and script - this wasn't so much written, as perpetrated. They're desperately trying to excuse the fact that they don't have an eponymous Mummy at all by calling him a Mummy at every possible chance (The closest would be a golem, but that's beside the point). That's without giving spoilers... ye gods I could go into some detail about how awful the script is with spoilers.

Brendan Fraser appeared to by cringing himself towards the end (particularly at some contrived father son tension), and John Hannah seems to have done the best that could be expected of him. Michelle Yeoh was passable and fortunately forgettable - hardly her fault though. The winners were Jet Li and the special effects team - both excellent. New Evie and grown up Alex and the script writers were truly abysmal, and the director and producers all need to be shot for allowing this to have been made at all.

Huge congratulations to Rachel Weisz's legal team for enabling her to sidestep this.