The Mummy was one of the most enjoyable pieces of hokum of the mid-1999 season, and a huge hit. Now writer-director Stephen Sommers has followed it up with The Mummy Returns.
The original cast returns as well, with South African Arnold Vosloo reaching the apogee of his acting career as the Mummy itself, and Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz doing duty once more as the intrepid pair of Egyptologists, a sort of Mr and Mrs Indiana Jones. John Hannah is back, too, as the cowardly brother-in-law, and Oded Fehr as the mysterious desert warrior Ardeth Bay. A new addition to the cast is Freddie Boath as the son of the exploring couple.
Apart from getting a cute child into the cast (I foresee a spin-off TV series – a teen Egypt-ologist!), the presence of Boath as young Alex O’Connell serves to indicate that some time has passed since the thrilling events of The Mummy. Besides reproducing, the O’Connells have done well for themselves in the interim, thanks presumably to a bit of treasure saved from the previous adventure. Now they live in a vast country house somewhere near London. Lucky them.
The movie kicks off with a prologue about the mythical Scorpion King (played by The Rock, a wrestler with the arms to prove it) trying to conquer Egypt with the help of Anubis, jackal-headed god of the dead. Portraying Anubis in this way, as an evil destroyer, is of course a travesty of ancient Egyptian theology (the desert god Seth would be a more suitable candidate), but we have to let that go. After all, an army of cyber-jackals, raised from the dead by the magic of computer-generated animation, is going to be more impressive than an army of mere quasi-humans. (At any rate, Seth, like Jehovah, to whom he is related, is invisible in the ancient iconography, so that’s no help.)
We also have to let go of any problems we might have with the gross calumny on the name of Imhotep, the revered architect-astronomer of the Third Dynasty, believed to be the designer of the first pyramid. His name has been given to the Mummy, a decidedly nasty character who, resurrected yet again, is now trying to bring the armies of the Scorpion King back to life.
It’s up to the O’Connells to stop him, retrieving their kidnapped son in the process. This involves floating across the desert in a dirigible, battling a troop of undead cannibal pygmies, and so forth, as well as some flashbacks to the previous lives of the protagonists. In this respect they are very much like real-life people who go back to their former incarnations and so often find they
have ancient Egyptian selves. It seems the Egyptians really did know the secret of life after death, though if they had known they would turn up in the 20th century they might not have been so keen.
The Mummy Returns is more of a fast-paced action-packed Indiana Jones-type adventure than was the first movie, which was a sort of horror comedy. That makes it fun in a relentless kind of way, though the characters (never more than vivid sketches in the first place) do suffer the consequences. Fraser and Weisz don’t even get much chance to utter witticisms as they dispatch their foes, which was part of the appeal of The Mummy, along with the development of their romance, which is now moot. The tension between their two characters is gone.
Inevitably, The Mummy Returns, as a sequel, lacks the surprise factor of its predecessor; our expectations are higher now, thus Sommers’s attempt to outdo himself. The result is entertaining nonsense, two hours of mindless diversion destined to be forgotten until The Mummy Returns Again. Which he will doubtless do; Vosloo is probably polishing his pecs as we speak.