The Mummy - Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor

Life’s A Dragon, 
Then You Die

The Mummy - 
Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor
United States/Germany/China/Canada 
2008 Directed by Rob Cohen
Universal UK Blu Ray

Warning: Some mild spoilers.

We were all smacking our lips in anticipation of a third film in the Rick O’ Connell Mummy series after the brilliance of The Mummy (reviewed here) and the pretty great follow up The Mummy Returns (reviewed here). And we were all dreadfully disappointed in what finally came out in cinemas. Stephen Sommers, who wrote and directed the previous two installments, did not direct this movie... other than he’s listed as one of the producers. I hate to say it but... it really shows. I don’t know why he wasn’t involved but his 2004 movie Van Helsing, where he further expanded his reimagining of the classic Universal monster movies, was not treated kindly by critics or box office alike. I don’t know why because I thought that particular take was also pretty good but, I don’t know, maybe that’s why he didn’t do the third Mummy movie. He is sorely missed in this sequel. 

Now, the film isn’t a total mess... it certainly works as a typical action adventure movie of the 2000s but, that’s where this film also fails big time. The thing about the previous two installments is that they were both something very special... so expectations were high this would deliver a similar concoction and, to be fair, a lot of the ingredients which made those two a huge success are present and relatively correct. There’s a huge element missing though and, that element would be... fun. Despite an overemphasis perhaps on the humour found in the first two, this film is not the entertaining romp it should have been and falls flat a lot of the time. That being said, there are one or two notable things in the film and, honestly, it’s not the cast’s fault for sure.

We only have two returning actors from the first film present and correct here... that would be Brendan Fraser as Rick O’Connell and John Hannah as Evelyn’s brother Jonathan. And they’re as good as they can be with this script... as are all the other actors. Another character returns from the previous film, Rick and Evie’s son Alex but, of course, since this is set halfway through the next decade again (each Mummy move in this series is set in a different decade) and Alex is supposed to be considerably older and grown up, he couldn’t be played by the same actor (as this was only about seven years since the last film). Instead they get Luke Ford, who makes a not bad stab at this and even, somehow, manages to have some of the same character traits of the child version from that last story. I say somehow because, character consistency is not high on the priority with the next actor I’ll talk about... again, not her fault.

Okay, so the great Rachel Weisz did not, for reasons known best to her (with many different reported explanations for her absence but I think I believe her when she says she didn’t like the script), return for this sequel. However, the character of Evelyn is all present and correct and the original actress was replaced in this film by Maria Bello. And she does a great job so I mean it as no disrespect to say that, in this role, she is no Miss Weisz. Now, one of the problems I have with her is that she is playing it in a much different manner to the character we’ve come to know. That decision could be defended by remembering that, in the last movie, Evelyn was resurrected from the dead as both herself and the daughter of the murdered Pharaoh in the first film... so a slightly different personality could be a valid choice... if that fact were at all referenced in this one but, nope, not much (if anything) is said about it (this time it’s her husband who gets killed and then brought back to life). She does get a nice line of dialogue though... which I’ll come back to in a minute. 

For the record, both Arnold Vosloo and Oded Fehr declined to return for this film also... so the original script must have been pretty different from what we ended up with. 

Two other big actors in this movie are both kung fu legends in their own country... Jet Li as the villainous Dragon Emperor himself and future Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh. Both are great but, come on... another reason people were chomping at the bit for this movie was that we wanted to see them both put their kung fu skills to use (and a ten minute fight scene between the two would have been most welcome). It would be an understatement to say that neither has a chance to shine in this one... especially in Yeoh’s case. 

Right... there are a few nice things. One is that we are re-introduced to Evelyn at a book reading of her latest novel, based on the second of her adventures. When someone asks her if the character in her book is based on her, Bello’s face is revealed and she says... “Honestly, I can say she's a completely different person.” Which is a nice and cheeky nod to the audience (pretty much the only one in the film, I’ll get to that) that she is a different actress taking over the role. It’s the exact same kind of metatextual comment on casting that George Lazenby delivers at the end of the pre-credits sequence in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (reviewed here) when he turns to the camera and says, “This never happened to the other fellow.” So... a nice moment. 

The only other nice thing in this movie... for me... asides from a nod to the first two films by having the name of Jonathan’s night club be “Imhotep’s”... is the inclusion of a small bunch of abominable snowmen... aka yetis... who help out our merry band of heroes at a crucial time. They’re nicely done although, I’ve no idea how two of the creatures can make a visual reference to the game of American Football... to be sure. Maybe try not to think about that too hard. 

A curious thing is that, when Jet Li’s character is fully resurrected, he can take on various forms. The two things he shape shifts into seem curious choices. One is a three headed dragon which bears an uncanny resemblance to King Ghidorah in the original Godzilla films and the other creature he changes into seems to slightly resemble King Caesar, from that same cycle of Godzilla films so... I dunno... I’m surprised the studio didn’t get sued over this. Maybe the director was secretly trying to pitch for a Godzilla reboot at the time? Who knows but... anyone who is into their kaiju eiga would surely get a jolt at seeing these creatures here.

As I was watching the film... I was trying to figure out why it just doesn’t work. There’s loads of humour (which mostly falls flat for me... unlike the other two movies), the action set pieces are well put together, the actors are all good and Randy Eidelman’s score for this (although partially replaced by stuff from John Debney, it would seem) is sweeping and fine... if not a patch on the scores provided for the earlier films by Jerry Goldsmith and Alan Silvestri. I think, for me, the film loses out in terms of the script and the way the humour is played. The script is really stating the obvious and explaining every last thing to the audience and capitalising it... me and my father looked at each other this time when a particularly stupid line (one of the unintentionally stupid lines) came up. And the other problem with it is that, unlike its predecessors, the audience aren’t let in on the joke. Asides from the “different person altogether” line, there are none of the sly winks to the audience that the other two had. It feels like its taking itself too seriously and, consequently, it never really gets us on its side... it’s just not as entertaining as either previous installment and... yeah... it’s just a bit of a let down.

No further films were made (as yet) in this series although, the Tom Cruise version of The Mummy (reviewed here) does include the book of the dead from the first film as a visual reference in one scene... so it’s technically taking place in the same universe. A fourth one featuring an Aztec Mummy was planned but never came to fruition... again, as yet. As for how I stand on this... well, for me, The Mummy - Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor certainly hasn’t grown on me. It was as much of a disappointment this time around as the previous times I saw it so, yeah, if you only see this one, don’t miss out on the first two just because this is not up to scratch. I hope someday the original writer/director and cast will come back to do just one more but... who knows if that will happen. 

The Relic

A Fright At The Museum

The Relic
1997 USA/UK/Germany/Japan/New Zealand
Directed by Peter Hyams
Universal DVD Region 2

Warning: Slight spoilers.

Wow. I hadn’t given this movie much thought in years... since I saw it back at the cinema in 1997 actually. Back then I’d gone away thinking I’d seen a pretty much half decent movie, but nothing too special. In fact, the reason why I decided to take advantage of HMV’s closing down sale and unearth this rare specimen again is because, earlier in the year, a proper CD version of John Debney’s score to this was released by La La Land Records and I liked the samples and ordered myself a copy (I’ve not got much Debney anyway and I always loved his gorgeous score to Cutthroat Island). So I thought I’d better remind myself of the movie again at some point if a cheap option of doing that became available.

Having seen it again, I am now in a position to be able to upgrade my original “meh” opinion a fair bit.

Based on a novel by Douglas J. Preston and Lincoln Child which was called, simply, Relic... this is one of those cases where the film rights are bought before the novel has even been published and then it’s forced to wait for release until the movie is out. Now I’ve not read the original novel as yet but, from what I can understand about it, I just can’t see why there was such a clamour to buy this thing when the studio obviously wanted to change so much of the basic characters and events and do their own thing instead.

For example, Relic is the first in a whole series of novels featuring Special Agent Aloysius X. L. Pendergast, who investigates strange things in what I can only assume is a series of stories written in The X Files manner. In the movie version, however, this main protagonist of the series is removed completely and some, but not all, of his character is combined with one of the other characters in the book... a character who is also quite badly misrepresented on screen, as far as I can tell, being that he’s extremely superstitious in the movie and quite the opposite in the original novel.

Never mind, though. Such, admittedly major, details as disappearing protagonists are not the be all and end all of the process of a good adaptation... I’m just not in a position to be able to tell you if this is a good adaptation or not. However, what I can tell you is that, although it’s cliché ridden, as a good old fashioned jump-scare horror yarn, this movie really does the trick.... building up the tension quite effectively as we wait to see if our two main protagonists detective Lt. Vincent D'Agosta and Dr. Margo Green (played by Tom Sizemore and Penelope Ann Miller respectively) are going to be bluntly decapitated by a man mutated into giant reptile creature and have the hypothalamus regions ripped out of their brains for food. Yeah, I know, It’s a B movie plot but the writers of the original novel are extremely well respected in their fields and I would still like to read both Relic and its direct sequel, Reliquary.

The basic strands of the story structure, at least in terms of the screen version of it, are fairly complicated to tie up in that you have to establish ways of having a police presence interested enough in a museum fund raising event to be there when things start to go wrong without actually cancelling it... which means political pressure to allow the museum to still run the event after several people have been found with their heads ripped off, either at the museum or on a boat that has connections to the museum itself in terms of a specific shipment. The director does this, mostly, quite deftly with me only raising my eyebrows a couple of times in response to some of the scenes... but it doesn’t detract too much from the visceral pleasures of the film’s ability to scare you when you least expect it to... and also when you most expect it to, to be fair.

Interestingly, there’s a nice inclusion in the movie which doesn’t, I’m think, come from the version of the story found in the book. When the “monster who was a man” comes to the US inside his packing case, the boat bringing the various bits of cargo back is found drifting somewhere not far from the central location. This makes for a scene where the crew on the boat are missing (although a lot of their blood is around and a lot of the crew turn up in various states of long dead goriness as the film progresses) and it becomes clear that something has been praying on them while it makes its passage to the USA. This, of course, is a direct parallel for Count Dracula’s voyage across from Transylvania to Whitby on the ship known as The Demeter and the sequences where Bram Stoker’s monster feeds off the crew inadvertently shipping him to England in his coffin. I’d like to think this was a specific reference and I was impressed with this little touch, if indeed it was the blatant referral I am giving them credit for.

There’s also a nice bit of what I’d like to think of as good natured stunt casting for a film which is, after all, primarily a large budget 1950s style monster movie, with the elderly, wheelchair bound Dr. Albert Frock being played by character actor James Whitmore. The character makes a good meal for the monster in this movie, being served up à la carte in his role... or should that be à la wheelchair... but I had to grin at this unfortunate turn of events. It was Whitmore himself, after all, who had played Sgt. Ben Peterson in the 1954 giant ant movie THEM!, so he should have been able to handle himself a little better, I feel, after hunting down all those giant ants in the tunnels at the end of that movie.

There are some strange little bits of business within the movie which don’t quite seem to make sense, though, which lets it down a little.

For example, a scene when two truant school children are locked in the museum one night and the last you see of them is where they corner themselves in the museum with the scary tell tale signs that they are about to be hunted to extinction by the movie’s prime special effect. There is no closure on this and you don’t see them again so the assumption is that they ended up as monster bait. However, I noticed a stray throwaway line spoken by one of the policemen later on that mentions “the kids who found that body the other night” and this seems to be at odds with any prior information we’ve been given. My guess is the two kids stayed around a bit longer in the original cut and that there’s probably footage of them finding a body and then finding a way out of their predicament. For some reason or another, either kids finding head ripped bodies being too gruesome or maybe the kids getting away from the monster not ratcheting the tension up (who knows), I reckon some footage was cut but there was no easy way to lose the later line in the edit... so they just left it in hoping nobody would notice. That’s my best guess on that one, anyway.

The other thing that really bothered me is that, throughout the movie for about two thirds of it, we keep cutting back to a museum technician who is painstakingly trying to restore a stone idol, presumably the “relic” of the title... however, once it is complete and some ominous music has played behind it, that’s the end of that. The relic in question seems to have no practical significance or interest, at least in the movie version, to the film called... um... The Relic. So I had no idea what was going on there then.

But, since I mentioned the ominous music... what about that score? Well, it’s really good, if derivative (although I don’t think the way it’s mixed in the movie as opposed to the album mix does it any favours). Derivative in the sense that, although both the composer and director are obviously admirers of the astonishing film scores of Jerry Goldsmith, the word homage is a bit of an understatement when it comes to the fact that this score seems, to me at least, to be very much John Debney’s version of Jerry Goldsmith’s ALIEN. Now that’s not an unusual thing for a lot of sci-fi and horror films  post-1978 in all honesty, but this one is a very good tribute to the score... which means it’s very close and blatant in a lot of spots, it seems. Still, it serves the movie reasonably well (and would do a whole lot better if you could hear some of those mini stingers fading out properly within the mix) and it makes for a great listen away from the accompanying images too... so job well done on that one too Mr. Debney.

And that’s about it... despite its weak points, the acting and script are of a sufficient quality that the lack of characterisation filled in by psychological and emotional props are enough to invest the audience with a certain level of interest and that helps when you are supposed to be worrying about various characters ending up as hypothalamus appetisers. The jump scares are cheap and clichéd but no less effective because Hyams as a director definitely knows how to build up a certain level of suspense. This makes it not too terrible as a horror flick... asides, maybe, for the love it or hate it creature effects by movie magician Stan Winston. Personally I thought the monster could have done with being a lot more badly lit, so we couldn’t really see it. Still it’s certainly effective as a big bulky thing coming to eat you and if you have a love of 50s B movie monster science, then this very late entry into that genre should fulfil your needs very nicely. Just watch out for that first cat!