It was… dull, mostly. They introduce some pointless characters, which might have been somewhat interesting except they really don’t have much reason to be there. The plot was so action-heavy that there was no meat to it, and the action was pretty boring. The movie was pretty blatant abuot trying to carry itself on CGI. This actually becomes pretty funny, as they obviously introduce random crap from nowhere just so someone could make a specific CGI scene they thought was cool. And which is actually pretty boring. It actually looks like they put two or three scripts into a blender and had to deal with it.
To illustrate -
First you’ve got the basic setup. Even Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who gets cursed in a Wow-Couldn’t-They-Do-Something-Slightly-More-Historical moment. Flash-forward to modern day (and these are by far the best scenes in the movie) where the family is having trouble dealing with their domesticity and the kid growing up. A couple characters are introduced , there’s a cool general who has no real place in the movie, and the bad guys are overall evil for no reason. generally speaking huge difficulties are created with no warning and then dropped with equally little warning. One of the hero characters (the girl) is actually a pretty sick individual if you think about, and who is willing to kill pretty casually. I don’t like her. The bad guy sort of randomly gets more superpowers, even though the ones he had he never used and they were incredibly dangerous. And he’s a martial arts master.
You could have saved yourself the misery by checking it out at Rotten Tomatoes. It’s rated at an awful 9%! I can’t imagine anybody but a masochist knowingly subjecting themselves to something that is clearly going to be that shitty.
The first The Mummy, way back in 1999, is one of only two movies I have ever walked out of in the middle. And I see a lot of movies. I’ve been trying to get Brendan Fraser indicted for war crimes ever since.
I’d like to know who took the statue emperor from the pedestal and put him on a chariot drawn by horses. And why. (I know why, it looked cooler when they found him 2000 years later).
I agree with everything the OP says, but I still had to see it because Michelle Yeoh AND Jet Li were in it. They got to do a little fight scene but I couldn’t help but think, wow, if only this movie had been made when they were 20 years younger.
Having just seen Oded Fehr in Burn Notice, let me reiterate what I thought should’ve happened after I watched Mummy Returns (and after not watching The Scorpion King).
They should make a sequel using the Medjai and Ardeth Bey as the heroes, and make it completely different in tone.