Oh I hate mummies - The Mummy Series

The trailer looks good. It does look more epic than the previous two.

 

I'm a big fan of the first Mummy film, but I thought the second one was average at best. The new trailer has me interested. But I do wonder about how much of a difference there will be without Rachel Weisz. And, too, I hope this film avoids the excessive cheese of the Mummy Returns.

 

Absolutely no one is talking about the new movie so I thought I should post my comments about the film.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor comes very close to working but the absence of Rachel Weisz and her role being recast with Maria Bello ultimately sinks the film. What made the first two Mummy movies so great was the characters and relationships between them. Weisz is at the center of all the character relationships being the sister/wife/mother to the other characters. When you take Weisz out of the equation the whole Mummy formula falls apart. All the characters end up being estranged from each other. Brenden Frasier is still good but there is zero chemistry between him and Marie Bello so it's almost like he's acting to a brick wall. John Hannah's role sadly become pointless this time around as he has nothing to do with the storyline unlike the first two films. The one relationship that works is the one between Brenden Fraser and Luke Ford as father and son. However many scenes have them paired off with someone else, usually Maria Bello, when they should have been together. A good father and son adventure movie could have been made here but Maria Bello really mucks the whole thing up.

 

Yeah the prologue I thought was quite well done although it goes on a bit. I actually think the movie is decent. However I just can't get over Maria Bello. Also the film suffers from shaky camera syndrome.

 

I watched the first two films the other night after seeing the new film and I had forgotten how gorgeous the cinematography was. The late Adrian Biddle did a wonderful job especially the desert scenes which are wonderfully golden. I also like that he and Stephen Sommers know how to photograph a set so we actually get a sense of scale. Too many modern films are composed entirely of medium and close-ups shots so it's great to see so many wide shots in The previous Mummy movies.

The shot of Bernard Fox sitting in the desert listing to his Victrola is quite striking.

[image=http://www.hotflick.net/flicks/1999_The_Mummy/Thumb/999TMY_Bernard_Fox_001.jpg]

 

I think the problem with her performance was that she was too comfortable with the posh, glamorous life at the beginning. Weisz was always a little (or a lot) nerdy, even when she was a warrior princess. I can buy that she came out of her shell a bit over the years (just as I can buy the on-again-off-again Americanization of the son's accent; he must have spent a lot of time in the States since TMR), but the script and Bello really didn't seem to fit each other until about halfway through Shanghai.

 

Apologies to anyone who liked this movie, but I walked out 45 minutes into the thing. It was embarrassingly dumb. The dialogue was unbelievably bad. The attempts at humor were so head-smackingly awful it seemed they were either penned by 3rd-graders or made up on the set for lack of anything better. The Weisz replacement not only looks nothing like Weisz, she is not even remotely pretty and is rather hard to look at -- especially her gigantic teeth -- when projected on a 50-foot screen. (This is not an attempt at insult or derogation; it's simply the way I feel.) We're also meant to accept that Brendan Fraser -- who looks about 32 -- could have a college-age son. I'm sure that later in the film, there are many dazzling CGI action sequences, but I for one did not have the stamina to get through all of the atrocious performances, ham-fisted exposition, and wink-wink moments of would-be comedy to arrive at the promised fun. I'm sorry, but this movie stinks.

 

I thought this movie was going to be horrible. So I went into it with very low expectations Saturday night.


I should've talked my friends into watching The Dark Knight. I guess I'll just wait for the DVD of that.

 

I saw it and it entertained me but afterwards thinking about it it was just not a good movie. Everything was pointless. It was just a useless movie. Mummy 1 was the best.

 

I agree with Gobi's statement about Rachael Weisz. I didn't even realize this movie was coming out until I got to the theater to see The Dark Knight only to find out it was sold out... STILL. But I liked the Mummy movies so this was a safe bet, I thought. After seeing it, I bet right. The movie was pretty good, as usual (didn't see the Scorpion King). The one thing that really threw it off for me was the recast. The chemistry with BF was so much better with Weisz, and she played the role better as well. That aspect didn't work at all, and it took me a bit to get past that. The movie was good enough to make up for it.

 

ok the parts with the chinese people not speaking chinese instead of english was painful.

its normal to speak chinese not english.

Look at Indy.

worked for him.

 

Why did they make this movie again? Between Sommers and Rachel W, shouldn't they have realized that they were missing too many constants in the equation?