Weisz is fun to watch when she has a chance to mock her lines and isn't staring off into the distance at a flashback from a previous life, as in a Shirley MacLaine autobiography. The actor slows down his Canadian cowpoke delivery even more than usual, so his eye-of-the-storm timing becomes the joke instead of his awful lines. Fraser's shaggy drollery provides a tone the director isn't quite up to.
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The battles have a pro forma breathlessness, and Mr. Yet the picture is energetic and unashamedly unoriginal and occasionally diverting, sometimes on purpose. Sommers's pilfering might be tolerable if he had a lighter touch, but he seems determined to leave as many thumbprints at the scene of the crime as possible, a ''stop me before I commit this crime again'' motif.
Sommers goes all the way back to the he-man camp of the director Howard Hawks and to George Stevens's ''Gunga Din.'' (To be sure, Mr. One scene includes lifts from both the ''Star Wars'' films - Imhotep does a Darth Vader - and ''The Wizard of Oz.'' The technique of Stephen Sommers, who returns as writer and director, brings to mind the credo of the comic book hero Hawkman, ''using the weapons of the past today.'' Mr. ''The Mummy Returns'' pillages old movies the way the scavengers in these films steal from the sacred tombs. ''You've started a chain reaction that could lead to the next apocalypse,'' Ardeth Bay (Oded Fehr), the stalwart good guy, growls ominously, apparently unaware that since the action takes place in 1933, the audience has already figured out that the apocalypse did not happen. The movie comes to life only during the martial portions, when two or three climactic battles are often yoked.īoth Alex and Evelyn are endangered (though she is much tougher than she was in the first ''Mummy'') because Alex has strapped on the dangerous bracelet of the Scorpion King. But the closest thing to wit comes in the action scenes, for example when a double decker bus is turned into a convertible. The idea that action figures are capable of an adult attachment is almost revelatory it makes us believe the movie might be invested in an emotionally honest moment or two, and that ''The Mummy Returns' might also be stealing from ''The Thin Man'' series. The only thing close to an original notion in this movie is that the hard-charging adventurer, Rick (Brendan Fraser, who has the sense of humor that Harrison Ford used to fall back on), and the archaeologist, Evelyn (Rachel Weisz), have married since the first film and are raising their 8-year-old son, Alex (Freddie Boath). It's probably a good thing that ''The Mummy Returns'' is stuffed with action.
Yet the noisome action sequences of ''The Mummy Returns'' are preferable to the quiet times, when the cast is limited to spouting dialogue that is a banal combination of exposition and homily. We'd be lucky if ''The Mummy Returns'' had 10 minutes of quiet, since it's crammed with enough action to make the Indiana Jones movies seem like a Henry James novel. The screenwriter Robert Towne (''Chinatown'') once asserted that an audience will give a movie 10 minutes, believing that a picture doesn't have to put the pedal to the metal from the outset and that viewers will allow it to find a rhythm. This enterprise is to the movies what an average boy band is to pop just because there's an audience for it doesn't mean it's any good. It even beats its 1999 predecessor, ''The Mummy,'' because at least the first film wasn't stealing from itself in addition to the collected works of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas and Universal's 1930's genre films. ''The Mummy Returns'' may be the least original motion picture ever, and there's a lot of competition for that title these days.
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