The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor (2008)

Created on August 01st, 2008 by Horrorholic

Rating:

There was once a time when hack filmmaker Stephen Sommers could’ve churned out a fun popcorn flick. Before he became notorious for ruining Universal’s imminent plans to reboot their most famous movie monsters in 2004, he was making passable children’s films like The Jungle Book and fun action-horror hybrids like Deep Rising and, to a lesser extent, The Mummy. Sure, some people scoff at the latter but I think once you get over the fact that its essentially an Errol Flynn adventure and not a horror film like the original, its a decent time waster.

It’s sequel saw the beginning of the Sommers we’ve all come to so notoriously despise, in that it was just a big, unnecessary and poorly conceived mess, filled with really awful CGI (seriously, whoever put the ending sequences together at ILM should never be allowed near another computer again). Perhaps most insulting about the entire film though was the reincarnation angle. Not because it was extremely stupid (it was) or made the movie feel like more of a jumble of ill-conceived ideas than it already was (it did). No, no… it was because that idea laid down the foundation and became a crucial part of the exposition for one of the worst films I have ever seen in my life: the one and only Van Helsing, a film that truly is the epitome of everything that is wrong with cinema in our modern day and age.

So, imagine the wonderful sense of satisfaction I felt when it was announced that Sommers was not returning for the third film in the Mummy franchise (Instead, he opted to go the route of George Lucas and rape my childhood with what I’m sure will be one of the most unsatisfying action films of the decade, G.I. Joe). Instead, someone at Universal thought it would be a great idea to bring in the director of The Fast And The Furious and Stealth, Rob Cohen, who hasn’t directed a good movie since Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, and leave Sommers as a producer. And in theory, I thought having anyone except ol’ Stephen behind the camera could’ve been a step up.

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