Boy, should have known better when I saw “tomb” in the title.  There is no resurrecting this film franchise.  It is well beyond the initial stinking and rotting phase.  I really, really enjoyed The Mummy and The Mummy Returns.  I thought they were well put-together adventures that rivaled any Indiana Jones flick, which is saying a lot.  Brendan Fraser proved in those movies that he just has a really poor agent by proving he can actually carry a movie if it’s well done.  Rachel Weisz arguably got her big break in the first, and was household by the second.  For good reason too.  She brought so much depth and grace and charm to her character that I fell in love right away.  So without her, it really wasn’t the same.  Not even close.

Image courtesy Universal Studios

It wasn’t just the lack of Rachel Weisz that doomed Tomb, although it certainly created such a void that was present every step of the way.  It was also the contrived relationship problems between father, Rick O’Connel (Fraser) and son Alex (Luke Ford).  It was also the false relationship between Alex and a stupid, unnecessary love interest.  And Maria Bello was dreadful.  Granted, she had big shoes to fill in Rachel Weisz’s character, but it was a mistake to keep Evey (Bello) around after Weisz dropped out.  She was absolutely dreadful, which is sad consider that she’s an Oscar-nominated actress.  To be fair, I don’t really blame her for that altogether either.  The Academy seems to hand out nominations or awards for women who bare all, whether the acting was very good or not.  That doesn’t excuse the lack of chemistry between Bello and Fraser, though. 

Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh also give a noble effort, but there just isn’t anything for them to work with. I don’t have anything good to say about this movie.  It’s so bad, it makes The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course seem like an inspired work of art.  I feel like I have a glimpse of what Senator McCain went through all those years ago in that torturous Vietnamese prison camp.  Except there is no glory.  No pride from heroism and sacrifice.  No just reward from surviving the perils of the unimaginable.  I just feel stupid for having gone.  (Okay, so it really doesn’t compare to McCain imprisonment, but you get the idea.)

I suppose the highlight of the night - Spoiler warning! - was when the magic snow monsters showed up to help the good guys out.  My wife and I had a pretty good laugh at that.  Though probably not in the way the filmmakers intended.  But they just weren’t magical enough to save the film.  Hell, Jack couldn’t buy enough beans to make it worthwhile.  And he only needed three to make the trip to the Giant’s land.

Speaking of “three,” what is going on with trilogies lately?  You’d think that if the first two movies of a series did well enough to make a third, that the last would be just as good or better.  Not necessarily the case.  In recent memory, there have been two particularly horrible part threes: Spider-Man 3 and X-Men: The Last Stand, which were so bad they make Starship Troopers seem like a cool movie. 

What’s worse is that the flaws of these films are often blamed on the politics of the film industry rather than the calculated decisions that just didn’t work.  Like the calculated decision to greenlight a terrible script. For instance, with X-Men 3, Bryan Singer’s absence and James Marsden following him to Superman Returns are frequently blamed for the poor quality of the third movie, as though anybody could have made that script into a decent movie.  Similarly, tempted as I am to blame Maria Bello as one of the causes of the poor quality of The Mummy, I can’t escape the fact that the script itself is just awful.

Long story short, like most third parts of trilogies, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor isn’t worth your money.  Or anybody’s money, for that matter.