Movie 4 # The Mummy Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor

"The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" is the film in question. Like the previous "Mummy" sequel, the third film in the franchise jumps forward a decade plus, to the cozy year of 1946. After spinning their various previous adventures into a career as spies for the Allies during the war, the O'Connell's (a returning Brendan Fraser and Maria Bello stepping into replace Rachel Weisz) have given up their adventuring ways, turning the keys over to their now twenty-something son Alex (Luke Ford). But when Alex uncovers the long lost tomb of the immortal Dragon Emperor (Jet Li), the fractured family's got to solve its problems in order to stop another mummy.
A movie series called "The Mummy" is naturally going to have a fairly limited focus. Universal and Alphaville might have been better off resetting the series to focus on the various adventures of Rick and Evelyn to give them a wider range of material to use. But they haven't, so mummies it is. New director Rob Cohen ("XXX," "The Fast and the Furious"), stepping in to replace franchise originator Stephen Sommers, and his screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar ("Smallville") have wisely chosen to pass on bringing previous villain Imohtep back, opting instead to create a new villain for the series based on the famous Terracotta Army from China.
In practice though, the new mummy is all but indistinguishable from the old one. He spends most of the time stomping through the film as a computer creation that vaguely resembles Jet Li, speaking with a heavily modulated voice, but with none of Li's charisma. The idea of an unstoppable Terracotta Soldier come to life isn't a bad one. Maybe not unique, but not bad, but the filmmakers don't seem comfortable with that, imbuing him with extra superpowers (control over the five classical Chinese elements). The only thing he's interested in is conquering the world, he doesn't seem to have any other desires or facets even before he became a mummy, and all he needs to do that is an ancient Chinese artifact that will allow him to fully unlock his powers and become immortal. An artifact the O'Connell's happen to have. Hmmm. This is all sounding vaguely familiar.
That's potentially okay though. The series has always been as much about the heroes as it was the villains, mixing a light sense of humor and decent repartee with some well-conceived heroics. A lot of that comes from good casting. Fraser remains a criminally underused leading man, one of the few able to change gears so easily between comedy and action without shortchanging either. And Bello cuts a surprisingly dashing action heroine, whose Evey is a completely different person from the bookish intellectual of the previous films. All of the film's best moments belong to them, especially their introduction as they slowly go mad in retirement. It's possible Fraser and Bello have even better chemistry than Fraser and Weisz did.