Strong points of the film:
- Brendan Fraser has a good persona for these kinds of absurd over-the-top movies. He knows how to strike a balance between action and levity which befits the intrinsic silliness of the material.
- Jet Li is suitably intense, and his character has a good mix of powers. I particularly liked the way he looked before he was fully reincarnated.
- The whole terra-cotta idea was begging to be done.
- The son, Alex. By the sweet lords of cinema, I have never seen a flatter character in a big-budget motion picture.
- The actress who replaced Rachel Weisz. She was competent, but it never really works to replace an actress with another actress playing the same character. Worse yet, they made her a typical Hollywood "strong woman", which is to say that she made a very strong impression and never really seemed to get rattled. The original Evelyn from the first movie had strong opinions, but she was terrified and discombobulated once the fighting started, just as she should have been.
- The "warrior woman" revision to the Evelyn character. This stupid idea helped sink the second film, and it does the same to this one. Evelyn was a clumsy bookish bespectacled librarian in the first movie, and that was part of the great charm of her character. In the second film, they made her the reincarnation of some fighting warrior chick from ancient Egypt, and irrevocably ruined her character.
- The nerfing of the bad guy. In the first Mummy movie, Imhotep was nigh-unstoppable. He was a living god, and the film reinforced this. At every turn, he seemed more invincible. But in the second one, the villain was a lame CGI scorpion with the face of The Rock, and he didn't even really do anything at all until the end of the movie. In this one, the villain is the Emperor, who is said to control the five elements: earth, wind, fire, water, and since it's Jet Li, I'm assuming the fifth element is kung fu. That's a pretty damned impressive dossier. Earlier in the film, he demonstrates the ability to control snow and turn it into ice shards, and he can hurl fireballs. At one point, he turns into a three-headed fire-breathing flying dragon. Pretty cool, but later in the film, his army is beset by an airplane, and his only response is to turn into a giant dog and attempt to leap into the air in a futile attempt to claw at it. Why the fuck doesn't he use his cool powers? Shouldn't he be hurling fireballs at the plane, or turning into a fire-breathing dragon to bring it down? Wouldn't it inspire so much more awe and dread if he seemed truly unstoppable, rather than just being a guy with a big bag of party tricks?
- The nerfing of the bad guy's army. They did this in the second film as well: when the dreaded Army of Anubis was raised, there was a growing sense of dread as the mere mortals of the Magi faced off against them. They charged, the battle was joined, and ... the Army of Anubis turned out to be a bunch of pussies. They literally crumbled when hit. The movie just hit the wall at that point, and never recovered. They do the same thing in the third movie: the undead Terra Cotta army is raised, and they look appropriately menacing, but they crumble like clay pottery when struck. Couldn't they have given them the consistency of granite, to make them much more threatening? They did say that the army would become "indestructible" once they passed the Great Wall, but of course, that only telegraphs the fact that they will never make it past the Great Wall. And sure enough, they don't. They don't even seem to be able to sweep past the undead skeletons that the kindly witch raises to stop them, even though they are the poorly equipped skeletons of the very same enemies that this same army effortlessly crushed 2500 years ago.
- The part where Brendan Fraser challenges Jet Li to stop using his powers and fight him hand to hand, like a man. In English, even though Jet Li's character doesn't understand a word of it. And it works: Jet Li fights him without using any of his powers: a mistake which naturally leads to his death. Groooaannnn ...
I guess that looks like a pretty scathing review. But it is what it is: a mindless summer popcorn movie. Besides, negative points #1, #3, #4, and #5 were all flaws found in the second movie as well, which for some reason got roughly five times as many positive reviews. And I have to admit that the kids loved it.
