Right, she's a reincarnated princess and I'm a warrior for God?

The Mummy Returns

(2001)

And this time they’ve brought their kid! Somehow, my previous encounter with this movie (at the cinema) did not leave an indelible memory of the smart-talking, trash-mouth brat in Stephen Sommers atrocious sequel. That might be because the main impact was borne by the deluge of hyperactive CGI, often of indefensibly poor quality.

The first film is passable in an empty-headed, frenetic way. But the sequel takes everything about it that was borderline annoying and ups it to relentlessly abusive levels. It’s a wearisome, tension-free experience, in which the residing ethos is “the more special effects there are, the better the resulting film must be”. Of which, they start off looking crudely “epic” (computer-generated vistas set in pharoaic times) but by the third act nothing passes muster. It’s a wonder that they considered of release standard, but anyone who has seen a Stephen Sommers film knows that he has inverse quality control.

The plot this time, dreamed up yet again by the creatively-challenged auteur, finds Rick (Brendan Fraser) and Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) with an eight-year-old genius son (Freddie Boath, who plays Alex, is miraculously still working) who irritates from his first scene. Few directors have a good understanding of how to portray kids in adventure movies (Spielberg is a notable exception), and this is just further confirmation. Think Last Action Hero levels of smug preciousness and you’ll be close. Directors seem to be under the illusion that kids like to see kids on screen. They don’t. They want to see Indiana Jones, and failing that Rick O’Connell. But definitely not their children.

Sommers was open about Universal demanding a sequel the day after the 1999 film opened to unexpectedly vast returns, but he clearly didn’t have a clue about what to do with it. Imhotep is unearthed, so is his bint. But this time he is required to defeat the fearsome Scorpion King and assume control of his army. Otherwise the Scorpion King will take over the Earth much as Arnold Vosloo threatened to do first time out.

The Scorpion King is introduced in the prologue played by a wrestler taking his first tentative steps into the acting arena. He’ll do pretty well for himself, all told, but this is a stinky introduction (the prequel film is a better prospect). When he returns in the climax, as one of the crummiest CGI creations you’ve seen in a blockbuster movie, you’ll have given up all hope for his career.

Borrowing one of the worst tricks in George Lucas’ storybook-for-beginners, Sommers retcons his main characters as possessing manifest destinies intertwined with Egypt. So Rick suddenly has a scorpion tattoo on his arm while Evelyn has become clairvoyant and aware of a past life in the time of Imhotep. Oh, and the boy is of crucial importance. This is desperately feeble stuff, with Sommers even resort to a girl-on-girl catfight at the climax.

There is no weight to the CGI, or the drama. Where there were torrents of scuttling beetles, now there are waves of scorpions (must be the same computer programme). And waves with faces. And pigmies and airships. It’s all quite exhaustingly poor. Alan Silvestri furnishes the film with a truly lousy score, the sort of blandly generic fare you’d find in a ‘70s family adventure movie. If there were any thrills or tensions to be found in the movie, the composer studiously avoids them.

None of the actors come out of this with honours. Hannah and Fraser manage to keep their heads above water while spouting Sommers’ tiresomely anachronistic gags. Weisz is stranded with some frightful action chick posturing. Lost’s Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje is at least allowed to show an active distaste for young Alex, so I guess he’s something of an audience surrogate.

*1/2

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

This guy’s armed with a hairdryer.

An Innocent Man (1989) (SPOILERS) Was it a chicken-and-egg thing with Tom Selleck and movies? Did he consistently end up in ropey pictures because other, bigger big-screen stars had first dibs on the good stuff? Or was it because he was a resolutely small-screen guy with limited range and zero good taste? Selleck had about half-a-dozen cinema outings during the 1980s, one of which, the very TV, very Touchstone Three Men and a Baby was a hit, but couldn’t be put wholly down to him. The final one was An Innocent Man , where he attempted to show some grit and mettle, as nice-guy Tom is framed and has to get tough to survive. Unfortunately, it’s another big-screen TV movie.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog