I like The Mummy. It's fun and enjoyable and its flaws aren't so glaringly noticeable that you start taking yourself out of the movie because of them. It's my favorite in the whole trilogy, a good time-killer if you ever need to waste away two hours of your life but don't want to be dragged to a current release because it just doesn't sound appealing.
That having been said, The Mummy Returns, the 2001 sequel, is much sloppier. There is a lot they're trying to accomplish with the story, but it doesn't quite fall together right. The premise is an elaborate tale which tries to convince us that the heroine is a reincarnated princess destined to fight the femme fatale for all eternity while she tries yet again to bring back her zombie priest lover, and they're also trying to resurrect the Scorpion King, some old dead guy who sold his soul to Anubis (I'll rant about this in due time, believe you me) to be able to conquer the world, so they can get to his army and do the same thing. As I said, there's a lot going on here, but the execution was very, very shoddy.
And I'll start pointing out how with the very, very, very very very very BIG mythology mistake this movie chooses to base it's entire premise on: they paint Anubis in the same light as the Christian Devil, as in, he dealt in souls and made Faustian contracts for no apparent reason. In The Mummy Returns, he does this with the Scorpion King, creating the undead army which becomes a plot point later on. That Anubis was some sort of evil deity is sorely mistaken. In reality (-ish), he guarded and guided the souls of the dead through the Underworld, one of the most dangerous places in the universe, full of lakes of fire, demon creatures of all shapes and sizes, and who knows what else. The story goes that he also helped judge the souls of the dead as good or evil by manning the scales on which this was done; this job was later taken by Osiris, but Anubis seemed to take it very well: he helped mummify the body, for one thing, and showed no signs of conflict with the arrangement, for another. And on another note, the ancient Egyptians already had a devil of sorts, a gigantic water snake which represented all that was wrong with the world, whom they called (whenever they dared) Apep and whom the Greeks called Apophis. Apep/Apophis would have made a great second bad guy/deity bad guy for this movie, as he was already built into the mythology that way, but for some reason Anubis is the acceptable target, even though assumptions about Anubis's evil character that Hollywood tends to make are categorically wrong and could be attributed to another Egyptian mythical character instead.
There's another huge mistake that the movie not only makes, but chooses to build its plot around: the concept of reincarnation (for some reason Hollywood translates that word as "coming back looking exactly like you used to in the past life in question", probably so they don't have to hire more people, even though genetically it's next to impossible for such an occurrence to take place in real life). The Egyptians had a huge life-and-death culture, creating an entire world where the soul goes to spend eternity (or it gets wiped from existence if it's evil). There's no room for reincarnation of the soul in the Egyptian death mythos. At. All. But here the idea is, playing a huge role in a story centered on ancient Egypt, and the ancient Egyptian characters don't bat an eyelash (at least the zombie priest doesn't). The idea of reincarnation shouldn't make sense to a religious/magical/political figure from ancient Egypt, because the ancient Egyptians didn't believe in reincarnation.
Already the premise is based on false (deliberate or otherwise) information, so on that grounds alone it hasn't got a leg to stand on. But there's another problem with creating a devil-esque character, no matter on what grounds: the morality tale aspect of it, which is something this movie feels like it's trying to accomplish, but it does this by tossing in Bible references--not so many as to be distracting, but it does it nonetheless. First we have someone serving the role of "Devil" (in this case Anubis), but we also have the "12 Tribes of the Medjai", which, now that I consider it, is eerily reminiscent of the 12 Tribes of Israel, as if they're still trying to shove an Abrahamic structure of thinking down our throats when let's be honest, it doesn't do anything for the story and it doesn't even have an impact on the viewer unless the viewer is discerning enough to notice. So there was really no point in the effort. (As an aside, having 12 tribes of Medjai also serves the purpose of having a gigantic army on the side of good to help fight the gigantic army on the side of evil, making it considerably more realistic than one to, say, a hundred thousand, good and evil respectively.)
I've got a bunch of other questions about this movie, too, such as why ancient Egypt apparently has an elaborate system of star-shaped keys, or how Rick would know how to respond to Ardeth's stranger quip, or how in the living hell does nobody notice that somebody shaved a double-decker bus right in the middle of London (or, for that matter, all the undead mummies wandering around trying to kill the protagonists)? Or, let's talk about that scene where two scantily-clad ancient Egyptian women are fighting with sais, which I am damned sure didn't exist back then, let alone in Egypt. And another thing: when these women are flipping around and about, how are they not flashing anyone their Sweet Paradises? I'd guess they took special care with their skirts, tucking everything in in such a way as to make sure that didn't happen, but in a world where you can cover a woman in body paint and nothing else and still have it be okay, this is a kind of sketchy explanation. And a third thing: I had no idea the mistress/prostitute had any right to clothes. I thought she was supposed to be naked all the time, but in this movie, she's allowed fabric. Did the pharaoh want something to rip later after he was all hot and heavy from watching the mistress fight his daughter or something? Or did she have to change later? (For the record, the third movie doesn't answer these questions at all.) And then there's the infamous "outrunning the sun" scene, and the sun is going backwards, but that's neither here nor there.
One last thing before I move on to what this movie's actually good for: why do we need two bad guys? I understand the plot has the lynch pin of killing one of them to assume control of that one's vast supernatural army, but surely this could've gone about in a smarter way. For instance, in The Mummy, I'm pretty sure they made it so the priest couldn't come back, but lo and behold, here he is again. Is he really so cursed as to never gain passage to the Underworld? Ever? If you eliminated the priest, you also eliminate the reincarnation storyline which makes no sense given the mythology we're dealing with here, and it would've saved a lot of problems, eventually. You could've brought in someone entirely new to match the Scorpion King, for example. What I'm trying to say is there are several smarter ways to go about this than what the movie tried to and didn't quite pull off. They had a good idea, I give them that, but again, execution was poor.
However, this movie is, if you can get past the beginning third or so, a good way to shut your brain off, just as the last one was. It may be a little bit harder to do this time around, but it is doable. There's lots of action, adventure, comedy, emotion, shirtless guys, making out, shirtless guys, making out, shirtless guys, making out... By no stretch is this intended to be an ageless classic passed on to grandchildren in Humanities class film units, but it is still possible to enjoy the ride.
...Until you break suspension of disbelief. For different people, that means different things, but for me, being the ancient Egyptian myth nerd that I am, part of it is the portrayal of Anubis as Satan, as if this is an attempt at a morality tale (which it's not), and part of it was the utter schlockiness of the picture. For example, there's one moment where the priest, and I shit you not, runs into the shot, kneels, holds up his hands, and screams "NOOOOOO!" in the most overly dramatic fashion possible. He caters to a camera which shouldn't even exist from his view and then purposefully makes something horrendously over the top out of it. For no good reason. And this has the insult-to-injury element of putting him in a dangerous position near a bottomless well of lost souls, where he later *SPOILERS* falls to his doom, which he wouldn't have done if he hadn't been so horny for the camera anyway (a camera which he shouldn't even know exists due to the very nature of filmmaking). An utterly nonsense moment like that is a guaranteed suspension-breaker, at least for someone like me.
Final verdict, having said all of that: not as good as the first one, makes very gaping, obvious mythology mistakes, but still half-decent. Maybe make a drinking game out of it.
P.S. Other random notes on this movie:
-The kid is a genius; he builds sand castles, makes little models of things, whatever he can to cause trouble and leave breadcrumbs for his parents. It's brilliant. Good on you, little British kid.
-This movie, its prequel, and even the 1930s Mummy with Boris Karloff all feature some evil "foreigner" British guy/wealthy man of leisure in a fez, whose sole purpose is to be evil and help resurrect the mummy.
-"The sands of time are racing against you." What, now you're bringing Prince of Persia into this?
-If this reincarnation thing is a thing in universe, how come the priest didn't think of it in the first movie?
-How does the mistress/prostitute/sex slave know how to fight?
-The entire Scorpion King in the climax has been CG'd, even when he's half human.
Next on "For the Love of Night at the Museum": And now, for something completely different! Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
Countdown: 286 Days to NATM 3
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