Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 30, 2008, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
It’s debatable whether The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is the weakest of this action/horror/CGI-overkill franchise, but it is the most wasteful of the possibilities it sets up for itself. Here’s a film that casts Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, two of the greatest martial artists in cinema history, as antagonists and then completely fritters away their climactic fight.
The relocation of this Mummy’s action from Egypt to China was a promising idea, particularly with scripters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (who amusingly combined Western and kung-fu tropes in Shanghai Noon and Shanghai Knights, and helped give Li his vivid Hollywood debut as story writers of Lethal Weapon 4) on board. But the result, under director Rob Cohen (taking over from prior writer/director Stephen Sommers, who remains as a producer) does little more than use its Asian cultural and historical references as window dressing on another round of the same-old same-old. Things start off decently enough, with the de rigueur period prologue revealing how a zealous king (Li) set out to conquer the known world and rule as its emperor. As death was the only thing he couldn’t defeat himself, he sought out the help of the sorceress Zi Yuan (Yeoh), whom he believed could effect his immortality. An unfortunate love triangle later, Zi Yuan wound up cursing the Emperor, transforming him and his army into terra-cotta statues.
Seeing these two resurrect centuries later, continuing to play out their rivalry and personal drama, might have been exciting; instead, we’re reintroduced to Rick and Evelyn O’Connell (Brendan Fraser and Maria Bello, the latter taking over for Rachel Weisz), former adventurers now living complacently at a British university circa 1947. The explorer’s mantle has been taken over by their grown son Alex (Luke Ford), who’s off in search of the Emperor’s tomb, and who recovers a regal-looking clay figure at the reins of a carriage led by similarly sculpted horses, bearing a stone coffin. Through a series of developments and betrayals that would probably take longer to explain here than they seem to play out on screen, Rick and Evelyn travel to Shanghai and have a testy reunion with Alex, and all three are involved when the Emperor resurrects in a local museum. (Curiously, after everyone involved thinks his remains lie within the coffin, this is soon described as a “decoy” for the actual ruler—standing in full view at the head of the carriage!)
The chase is thus afoot as the dysfunctional O’Connells race the Emperor and his human military followers toward Shangri-la, where the villain can achieve complete immortality. (Those Chinese army officials hope the Emperor can reassert their country’s glory; given the timeframe, the obvious context would seem to be the aftermath of WWII, but the film has been stripped clean of any sociopolitical themes that might confuse the kids in the audience.) The family is joined by Lin (Isabella Leong), a young woman with her own grudge against the Emperor, and Evelyn’s brother Jonathan (John Hannah), the latter for no apparent reason other than to make lame wisecracks and be the butt of clumsy gags like getting yakked on by a yak. Later, there’s a bit where he professes his affection for the animal; when the two eventually separate, the music swells with romantic urgency, and it’s hard to know just how much Cohen is kidding.
In the midst of it all, the O’Connells engage in boilerplate, anachronistic discussions of how Rick needs to be a better father and Alex needs to appreciate his dad. There’s also the obligatory scene in which Alex and Lin deny, in the most on-the-nose way possible, the attraction that’s obviously growing between them. Lin asserts that Alex can’t bring himself to couple up with a girl “who can knock you on your backside,” and he retorts, “The expression is ‘kick my ass’!” (Not in 1947, it wasn’t.) Fraser remains well-cast as the rugged yet not-always-capable hero, but his bon mots are weak, and he and Bello—a fine actress miscast here, with an occasionally shaky British accent—don’t share the chemistry he had with Weisz. The material similarly hamstrings Ford, an Australian who submerges his own accent just fine and is a good physical choice to play Fraser’s offspring—even though the latter doesn’t look quite old enough to have a son Ford’s age.
Li and Yeoh make stronger impressions in their limited screen time, but neither is given enough to do; for a great deal of Tomb, the Emperor is a digital figure stalking through the setpieces. The movie is stocked with all the CGI spectacle and creatures a big budget can buy, but they lack a compelling story to support them, and on their own terms, we’ve seen all this stuff before: brutish monsters tossing humans hither and yon, digitally decomposing faces, overhead shots of huge armies rushing at each other, etc. The biggest disappointment lies in the hand-to-hand combat scenes, which are all too-tight framing, ADD editing and PG-13-softened impact shots. Having employed the immense fighting talents of Li and Yeoh, Cohen never gives them a chance to show their stuff, and their final-reel duel is a half-hearted, truncated affair that’s completely unworthy of their extraordinary abilities. For all its own faults, at least this year’s The Forbidden Kingdom delivered with its own eagerly awaited matchup between Li and Jackie Chan.
While we’re making comparisons…anyone who criticized Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for being underwritten or overreliant on computerized trickery will bite their tongues when they see Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. And fans of genuine Far East fantastique will be similarly let down. On the way out of the theater, I was walking behind a father and son talking about the sequence in which the Emperor transforms into a three-headed golden dragon, and the dad told the boy, “I bet I know what you were thinking.” I had to wonder whether the kid had been thinking about King Ghidorah, how familiar he was with Asian genre fare at its best, and whether he was as disappointed as I was by this overproduced but pale imitation.
