Popcorn in December

The series of Mummy pictures, launched in 1999 and staring the Cornish-trained Brendan Fraser, were better than they needed to be. In its first two installments, at least, the franchise had a certain lightness beneath all those impressive CGI effects. Fraser knew that his pre-WWII adventurer-archaeologist was a poor man's Indiana Jones. And the pictures continued the anything-for-a-scare legacy of the original Universal Studios horror films of the '30s and '40s, which basically wrote the mummy rule book.

Released in August, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor changed locales, kept the effects (and added some), bloated its run time (two and one-half hours), forced a new family theme (with an heir to anchor a new series), and made some crucial cast substitutions. Among the latter, we're always glad to see Michelle Yeoh (pictured above). But as the largely indifferent reviews indicated, something had been lost from the originally fun Mummy formula...

All of which is reminiscent of this summer's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (review), which also jumped a family into the post-war era. In one stroke, Hollywood assumes, we get the parent demo, the father-son tension, all in one family outing. Theaters get to sell lots of popcorn and candy (thanks, Dad), but I'd hate to think of the car ride home. This Mummy is a tremendous disappointment. The first two (already on DVD), directed by Stephen Sommers, didn't pummel you quite so hard. Fraser was younger, more of an eager doofus (a mode essentially perfected in George of the Jungle and Dudley Do-Right), while this seems more like an international paycheck job. Bello, accustomed to indie work in films like A History of Violence and The Cooler, doesn't appear comfortable with acting against a green screen, the accent, or Fraser. (Tgough she is cute as a brunette.) And while Fraser retains some of his lunk likeability, Ford is just a chuck of lunk, a lump, a big dumb smile chiseled on granite. Good luck with the spin-off series (likely to begin in Peru, as Hannah tips in the last scene).

But casting only matters so much in an adventure-and-effects movie. The larger problem here is that new director Rob Cohen (a longtime Hollywood producer turned director of fare like The Fast and the Furious) stages everything like a car chase. Despite some real locations in China, there's none of the scenic grandeur of, say, House of Flying Daggers or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon--whose Yeoh reminds us by her presence here. If you're gonna go to China--go to China! Go all the way. Here, weirdly, Yeoh and tiny Jet Li (this year's mummy) converse in Chinese with subtitles; the tomb raiders speak English; and the action sequences are some sort of international purée of stunt men, computer effects, and wire work. The climactic battle between Li's resurrected terra cotta warriors and an army of undead skeletons is hardly any scarier or more effective than vintage Ray Harryhausen stop-motion films. For that matter, it also recalls, and also unfavorably, the 1992 Army of Darkness.

Which is exactly what the Mummy brand--if there are to be any more such pictures--needs most: a director like Sam Raimi, and a new leading man with Bruce Campbell's dumb charisma. Fraser once had a little of that. Universal would be wise to fire Ford, fire Cohen, and start digging for a new young actor, preferably an athlete, who's willing to look scared and foolish when the next mummy comes at him.