The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor

Where is the tough China hand when you actually need it? Perhaps with its attention focused on the Olympics, this film escaped Wen Jiabao and Company. If not for the sake of treasures of ancient China or the Shangri-La up for blasting by English explorers, if not for the sake of its terracotta army dug up to fill a Hollywood fantasy, if not for our common good sense, at least for the sake of the entertaining Jet Li and the talented Michelle Yeoh, somebody needed to stop this misadventure.

This is what happens when you are making the third in a successful series and have a huge budget. Why have just one mummy? Have lakhs of them. Why shoot anywhere but in China? Why not cast its top stars and have them walk around covered in half-baked terracotta? Why not blaze through Shanghai or crashland on the Himalayas, set off an avalanche or two? Why not talk immortality and have characters sif in and out of it? Why not throw in a yeti or two, or three? Why not give the famous Rick O’Connell (Fraser) and wife Evelyn (Bello) a son who is an equally talented archaeologist? Why not just go on and on?

All this one could still sit through — forgetting that Indiana Jones just drifted by our screens — if Fraser just turned on his charm. It is on this that the Mummy franchise has lasted, long enough for a third outing. Instead, we get a bland, boring, too-old Luke Ford trying desperately to work up a charm like his old man Rick. Give us the mummy any day.

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