"Sigh..."
That was my first draft of the review you're reading. I still think that it's sufficiently descriptive of what I have to say on this film, but in the interest of clarity I'll elaborate.
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor was awful. That's the best way to put it. It was very, very, very bad. It wasn't good at all. I even approached it from the requisite "Just entertain me for 2 hours," viewpoint. That didn't help. It's not entertaining, it's not interesting, it's not at all worth your time.
The script is so bad... I can't grasp how they read through it, let alone shot it. Meandering, unfunny, lengthy dialogue scenes go on forever. There's no energy or charisma. The wittiest parts are dry and awkward, in the worst ways. Even though it follows a string of events we've seen over and over again, it doesn't follow it the right way. At countless times, the story could end at the cost of a shattered diamond or a slightly damaged artifact. Crippling plot holes line the film and no one is going to see past them. At the opening midnight show I went to, more people reacted positively to a Coke ad before the movie than the movie itself. I've never felt such a feeling of quiet and death looming above a theater. And I've been in theaters alone before.
The acting... ugh. It's uniformly grade school level, except there are quite a few great child actors in grade school right now. The trailer, which you've all seen dozens of times by now, I'm sure, has several alternate takes not seen or heard in the film, and they're uniformly better than those used. Likewise, the term "Dragon Emperor," I don't believe was used once, by anyone.
On top of everything else, the effects aren't even good. The CGI is what you'd expect from a direct-to-DVD film right now, and doesn't even match the extremely dated imagery in The Mummy Returns. It's a shame, too, because there are several scenes with seemingly hundreds of live action extras on grand sets. The action scenes are crippled with stupid art design and shitty effects work, and they're not even edited well.
I honestly don't know what happened here. This is just... wrong. I'm not even a huge fan of the first two movies, but this is like a sharp knuckle to the temple, repeated for an hour and forty-five minutes.
There's very little else to say on the film. If the attendance at the midnight show is any indication, no one's gonna see this movie. Still though, don't see this movie.
"The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" opens August 1, 2008 and is rated PG13. Adventure. Directed by Rob Cohen. Written by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar. Starring Brendan Fraser, Jet Li, Maria Bello, Michelle Yeoh.
