For her third film, and the second of a back-to-back series, this week Dipannita brought us the sequel to her last film, the 2001 Stephen Sommers offering The Mummy Returns – and after a while, I was even convinced that this was so. That’s an odd statement. But then again…
Say, for as far away as they stretch, these sands are neither lone nor level!
The film opens with the backstory of one Scorpion King (hereafter: “Rock Lobster”). It’s a typical backstory, it basically goes like this: Rock Lobster tries to lead an army to conquer the world; Rock Lobster is defeated; Rock Lobster promises his eternal soul or some such to the god Anubis, who greedily takes that offer.
When chihuahuas dream
So Anubis uses Rock Lobster and his army to defeat, well, somebody else, and then banishes Rock Lobster’s soul to the oasis of Ahm Shere (hereafter: TimeShare…and believe me, nobody wants to have their soul banished to a timeshare. You can’t get rid of those things! I mean, you may think there are a lot of curses in this movie series, but if you haven’t ever tried to get out from under a timeshare you don’t want anymore…) But I digress…as did the movie. If I mention that the film has literally zero title sequence, and that I have the retroactive benefit of being quite aware that there was a The Rock movie called The Scorpion King, you might understand why, after at least five minutes of Rock Lobster exposition, I began to wonder if perhaps Dipannita had switched up the movie on us – or whether I had simply blown it and misreported the movie she wanted to present, and she was just too kind to correct me.
…and baby makes twee
We then jump forwards about 9 years from the previous film (some inconsistencies between the title card years of the two films have been pointed out) reintroduce old friends Sir Vivorguilt and EV (now Lady Vivorguilt) and their precocious son Duke Vivorguilt (hereafter, “Duke Vivorguilt And The Friendship Bracelet Of Doom”…no, that’s too long. How about “Bracelet Boy”?) who is following the family lead in Ancient Egyptian Archeothaumatology. In fact, the entire family, when we meet them again for the first time, are on a dig where they recover the Bracelet of Anubis, which of course is just riddled with curses and spells and prophecies related to the Rock Lobster. I’m telling you, it just wasn’t possible for a person to die in Ancient Egypt without laying out some completely arbitrary and disastrous curse. When they died, they had Curse Reveal parties, you know, lighting off some colored fireworks so everybody is like, “Oooh! It’s a None-Shall-Disturb-My-Body-Without-Developing-Crippling-Gout-Unless-They-First-Travel-To-The-Wadi-Of-Haroun-And-Eat-Three-Bananas-While-Standing-On-Their-Head-In-Less-Than-48-Hours curse! Congratulations!” (That firework color sequence, BTW, is purple, red, pink, pink, pink, really pink, green, pink, black, black, black with a thin strip of tinny-silver kind of on the left, pink, and not-blue.)
Every time this dude logs back on he has to reclothe himself in the flesh of mortals
It turns out that there’s another group looking for the Bracelet of Anubis – this group just happens to be digging out Hymenoptera – you remember Hymenoptera, which was buried beneath the desert sands at the end of the last film? Well, they’re digging it back up, because they want to resurrect IMNSHOtep, and they want the Bracelet of Anubis so that they can resurrect Rock Lobster so that they can have IMNSHOtep and Rock Lobster destroy each other in a grand Kaiju fight like Godzilla Vs. Kong or something. It’s about this time that I realize that in fact, yes, this must be The Mummy Returns and not The Scorpion King after all. We’re probably half an hour into the movie. Anyway, the movie tries to be clear about why they would want to do this (other than selling the PPV rights) but I have to admit I didn’t really care and I think it had to do with being able to take over the Army of Anubis, which is really just a bunch of black sand, but when it coalesces into an army of dog-warriors they’re impossible to kill, because they’re made of sand, unless you cut their sand heads off. Which makes perfect sense when you don’t think about it.
If you think this is kind of arbitrary, well, look no further than the rest of the movie series. The entire plot line is “There’s an arbitrary magic/curse/prophecy/artifact for that!”
The bouncer checked my ID, bro! Now are you going to get me a Shirley Temple or not?
Unfortunately for everybody involved, the Kaiju PPV team didn’t get to the Bracelet of Anubis first, so they have to track our heroes back to London where they break into Castle Vivorguilt to steal it. But unbeknownst to everybody else, in the meantime Bracelet Boy has decided to crack into the chest holding the bracelet and try it on, at which point it clasps to his wrist like a ferric choke. It turns into a pretty awesome holographic projector, which basically lays out pyramids and Karnak and stuff, you know, an itinerary on a trip that he has to make to TimeShare. He has to get inside the pyramid at the Oasis of Timeshare in 8 days or something. Because, you know, he put on the bracelet, and because, you know, there’s an arbitrary curse for that.
Meanwhile on Cinemax…
It’s at this point – during the perilous castle break-in of the Kaiju PPV team – that EV starts to really Mary Sue it and show a pronounced proclivity for sword fighting. And come to think of it, she sure seemed to have some interesting foreknowledge about the puzzles laid out within the ruins in their Bracelet of Anubis dig. Well, let me tell you this: In a plot twist that was somehow completely absent from the first film, EV turns out to be the reincarnation of Nefertiti, because of course she does. To say that this revelation is not adequately explained would be an insult to inadequate explanations. The movie doesn’t even bother to wave a passing hand at it. This is Nefertiti, the daughter of Pharaoh Seti I, who was the Pharaoh killed by his mistress Sue and high priest IMNSHOtep. Convenient. Though it’s not clear why it is that IMNSHOtep mistook EVtiti for Sue in the last film, when he should have known her. Anyway, EVtiti has some awesome sword skills because she used to stage fights with Sue in ancient times to please Pharaoh. Which is kinda sus, really. An old man watching his daughter and his mistress catfight with swords for entertainment. I’m not sure that guy was completely on the up-and-up.
But what about the prestige?
ANYWAY. Things get really confusing for a while and Bracelet Boy gets kidnapped by the Kaiju PPV team (a team which includes the actual modern-day reincarnation – but only in body [which doesn’t make any sense] – of Sue) and there’s a double-decker bus chase on a bus that wasn’t produced until like two decades after the film was set, and while Bracelet Boy is making train latrine escapes and losing at strip poker in the desert, Sir V. realizes that in order to rescue his son, whose golden arm is being transported across the world to the Oasis of TimeShare to resurrect Rock Lobster and get the Kaiju Deathmatch on, the family – Sir V., EVtiti, and good old brother Carny – must get to TimeShare first. And Sir V. has a plan. Because he knows a pilot in Egypt.
Above 5000 meters, you can survive the sandstorm
A pilot who, it turns out, no longer owns a plane but now has…a dirigible. Of course, it’s a dirigible with not only a propeller, but also rocket engines for propulsion. Since Goddard launched a liquid rocket in 1926, and this is supposed to be like 1933, these are in fact cutting edge, but NOT anachronistic!
No. No, don’t. No, don’t! NO DON’T! Oh, geez, you did.
And it’s a cute idea, but unfortunately the dirigible doesn’t follow Newton’s First Law. To wit: when attempting to flee the giant screamy-face tidal wave created by IMNSHOtep that is chasing them into the Oasis of TimeShare (there’s arbitrary magic for that!) the rockets suddenly run out of fuel, and the entire dirigible comes to a screeching halt in midair. I mean, the thing was obviously not optimized for minimal drag coefficient, but this is ridiculous. This means that the tidal wave crashes the dirigible into the Oasis of TimeShare with the effect of, well, as best as I could tell completely destroying it. Sir V. just blithely tells our pilot to fix it and the rest of our heroes head out into the oasis.
Cannibal pygmy zombie grillz
Where they are quickly attacked by cannibal pygmy zombie mummies. Real fast suckers, too. The purpose of the arbitrary cannibal pygmy zombie mummies is to pad the film. MST3K was wrong. Only peril pads the film.
So anyway Sir V. somehow comes across Bracelet Boy and they manage to outrun the day/night delimiter (which, it has been pointed out, is going the wrong direction – it should start from the TOP of the pyramid) and get into the safety of the pyramid and out of the clutches of the curse of the Bracelet of Anubis with about 14.57 nanoseconds to go. That was close! I thought they might not make it, especially since they were trying to outrun a delimiter which, near the equator, is traveling at about 1000 miles an hour. (I lied. I always knew they would make it out of this impossible peril.) At this point, the Bracelet of Anubis, having served its purpose, detaches from Bracelet Boy’s arm.
Oh, I see we’re using this effect again
Peril, peril, umm…peril. IMNSHOtep has got a whole “resurrect Sue” thing going on, which makes some sense as it is his primary fixation and he didn’t actually sign up for the Kaiju title fight. At some point the leader of the Kaiju PPV team gathers up the Bracelet of Anubis (I think this happens off-screen, but maybe I just checked out for a second) and sticks his arm into some glory hole (was it the Mouth of Anubis? I don’t know.) whereupon the flesh of his hand is sucked off entirely, leaving just the bones and ligaments, which was actually a plus effect. This also apparently does summon our second Kaiju, and…oh, boy.
Never put a crappy video game inside your movie
Let’s just say that for all the money spent on CGI for this film, none of it was put towards the present-day incarnation of Rock Lobster, who in addition to having an extra set of pincers, also had the most cartoonishly bad attempt at Rock-face you could possibly imagine. At times it even looked like a pre-production mock-up from an era when the digital artists maybe thought that the role was to be filled by Arnold Schwarzenegger and they rushed something out to show the producers. Then, you know, somehow they forgot to actually finish up the rendering and put in the Dwyane Johnson scans and instead just called it good. It’s embarrasing.
I can’t say whether the Kaiju fight was any good or not, because I was just gaping at the CGI badness like IMNSHOtep in the picture one up from this one. But it was a good thing that an arbitrary golden rod had been brought to Egypt all the way from merry olde England, because the wall paintings there at the Pyramid of the Oasis of TimeShare show that said rod actually turns into a telescoping spear, which can then be used to derender the Rock Lobster. (There’s an arbitrary wall painting AND an arbitrary artifact for that!) Consider this fight over, and IMNSHOtep given the title belt.
Hold your ground, hold your ground! Sons of Gondor, of Rohan, my brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!
Meanwhile, outside the Oasis of TimeShare, the armies of the Magi face off against the black sand Army of Anubis, and nobody really cares. They start out on horses. Then their horses are gone. Then the hero Magus dude has his horse back, but you can see by the hoofprints in the sand that they used like the 75th take. The Army of Anubis dissolves into black sand right in their moment of triumph, probably because the Rock Lobster was defeated? I don’t know, I had stopped caring a very long time before.
Don’t cross the Seal!
But we’re not done with arbitrary peril, because IMNSHOtep and Sir V. both get pulled to the edge of some bizarre Dante’s Inferno, where the souls of the damned are clawing at their feet and attempting to pull them down to the depths. I think this happens because the death of the Rock Lobster has set off a trap wherein the entire pyramid is self-destructing…just like Hymenoptera at the end of the first film. Like, dude, Sommers, try another bit! Anyhow, both EVtiti and Sue witness this, and EVtiti comes to Sir V’s rescue. But Sue turns and flees to save herself, and IMNSHOtep, knowing that he will never be truly loved, gives up hope and lets himself fall into the oblivion of the First Circle like a proper man.
One should not forget, however, that the trap has been sprung, and our heroes all climb to the top of the pyramid as it is hoovering up the Oasis of TimeShare and they have no chance of escape…until we get the dirigible ex machina. Completely destroyed dirigibles, it seems, can in fact be repaired in the middle of Egyptian oases while surrounded by fast and ravenous cannibal pygmy zombie mummies. Who even doubted it? Our heroes climb aboard, Carny grabbing the golden top of the pyramid on the way out (I’m sure that will play into the remainder of the series) and as they make their escape the whole thing, the Oasis of TimeShare, pyramid, and all, sinks into the desert sands like a giant prolapsed sphincter. The End.
Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site 