In short: The Mummy Returns (2001)

Some of what I said about the first Stephen Sommers The Mummy movie still goes. At the time when he made this sequel, he certainly still knew how to stage a series of awesome and escalating action set pieces created with CGI before CGI was automatically good looking once you’ve got a certain budget, and he also still realized he needed to ground the loud stuff in the human (though of course not the naturalistic), so we do join Rick and Evie (still Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz) as a still adventuring wife and husband duo with an only mildly obnoxious kid (Freddie Boath), the film really getting how you’d want things to have worked out for these two, boring realism be damned.

Sommers also hasn’t lost his feel for breakneck pacing, though the sequel’s middle part is a bit flabbier, though not terribly so, than the one of the first. That’s mostly on account of Sommers’s script containing quite a bit of backstory and side material that needs to somehow be provided to the audience. As a matter of personal taste, I’m not terribly fond of the whole rebirth and chosen one subplot for our heroic couple – I’d rather see people kick the bad guy’s ass because they are competent and heroic and willing to do the right thing instead of fated to do it – but I have to admit, the finale does use all of the elements Sommers has built before rather well, giving the whole silly affair a surprising feeling of the organic with an internal logic of its own, while also including enough awesome goofy nonsense like Egyptian pygmy mummies. Again, the film goes out of its way to have every character do something of import, giving the whole affair a surprisingly inclusive bent, too.


The script isn’t as dumb as it pretends to be in other regards too. At the very least, the film very consciously builds up a contrast between a healthy Big Love as embodied by Evie and Rick and the rather destructive one between Imhotep (still Arnold Vosloo) and Anck-Su-Namun (Patricia Velasquez). It’s not terribly deep, but it’s neither dumb nor hollow either, and that’s really the thing that surprises me most about Sommers’s Mummy movies when watched fairly: they may be big dumb fun, but they are not stupid.