[sub](I did a search, but didn’t come across any substantial discussion.)[/sub]
Last night, I finally get around to seeing The Mummy Returns on DVD. Now, the first movie (The Mummy) wasn’t anything to write home about, but it didn’t stink up the place too badly. The eponymous title villain was suitably scary, and there seemed to be a plot. In any event, the critic’s consensus was that the sequel was better than the first movie, so I decided it was worth the rental.
What a mistake. This was by far the worst movie I’ve seen all year. The plot was completely incoherent. It was never clear where the action was taking place. The scary villain from the first flick has been reduced to comic relief. And the Scorpion King? A Halloween mask of “The Rock” would look more realistic. Of course, this villain was only on the screen for about five minutes, so it didn’t matter much anyway.
I was also struck by the fact that the characters were so uninvolved with what was going around them. (Ho hum, we’re going to die. Or not. Whatever.) I guess the movie is supposed to be an action/adventure flick, but how is the audience supposed to get caught up in the action if the characters don’t even seem to care?
Worst of all, though, was just how stupid everything got. A homemade hot air balloon? (It looked like it was ripped off from Baron Munchausen.) Double-decker buses? Berzerker pygmy skeletons?!
You just know a movie’s gone downhill when you get a headache from excessive eye-rolling.
I saw it in the theater and wasn’t disappointed. I hadn’t seen the first movie, so that wasn’t a problem. It was summer, I was living alone, it was my day off from work, I had some money, and I was in the mood for a big, dumb, Hollywood movie with a lot of special effects and explosions, and that’s what I got.
BTW, I absolutely refused to see “Pearl Harbor,” even though it was the only film that opened that weekend. I stayed home that weekend, grinding my teeth that there was absolutely nothing else I wanted to see. I have some standards, you know.
I agree about the hot-air balloon sequence and the rest of the island-sized plot holes. It was a stoooopid movie, but I never expected it to be anything but that.
I enjoyed this movie, actually, for one very specific reason. It made me feel like an eight-year-old kid in a theater on a Saturday afternoon matinee eating popcorn and cheering for the good guys, throwing popcorn at the bad guys, and leaving the movie without any thought expended.
It had the feeling of a 1930s serial adventure - a bit ludicrous at times, unabashedly anachronistic at others, but enjoyable if you just sit back and go with it. For some reason, other ‘mindless’ movies don’t appeal to me - I can’t think of a single other movie offhand that I enjoyed just on its own merits, rather than attempting to look for astronomical consistency, ‘realistic’ supernatural effects, and so on.
When I watch it, rather than nitpick when I would normally roll my eyes, I just laugh at myself and say “Just go with it! Just go with it!” I wish I knew why I’m not able to “just go with” any other bad movie. (Or maybe I should say “any other movie with limited ambitions”.)
Man, I rented it last night because I liked the first one so much. I got exactly 53 minutes into this movie and gave up outta pure boredom. Believe me, I have a high, high tolerance for crappy movies, but for some reason this was not only bad largely for the reasons already mentioned, but somehow, even with all of that running, slashing, noise and shooting, just plain boring.
I don’t know. I enjoyed it. I was expecting a mindless Hollywood adventure with lots of special effects and that’s what I got. The meaning of life wasn’t in the movie. It wasn’t a masterpiece. But it was fun.
Wish I could contribute to this, but I haven’t seen the movie yet. I would, but all the video stores in my area have seen fit to stock only the full-frame version of the DVD for rental. I’ll be damned if I’m gonna pay for anything other than widescreen.
My taste in movies tends to be somewhat lowbrow. I liked The Mummy, so I went to see The Mummy Returns in the theatre. The biggest problem I saw with the movie is that I had seen it all before, in The Mummy. It seemed less like a sequal and more like a remake!
I walked out of The Mummy Returns thinking “Man, that just wasn’t as believable as the first one.” I really did enjoy The Mummy but I just couldn’t get into the sequel.
