Cynical Cinema

The original Mummy movie was kind of neat.  Not fantastic, not a brilliant achievement by any means, but fun and action-packed and charming in a certain way.  The second Mummy was much worse.  But at the very least it was exactly what kids have come to expect from Brendan Fraser.  He will draw laughs by falling down and hurting himself, and he will throw cheesy lines at the screen with all the charisma of a bag of trail mix.  All of this is cranked up for the third installment in the series, The Mummy:  Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.  And it is much, much worse.  This is one of the worst movies of the year.  Like many series that run on too long (think about that original run of Batman movies) there are more and more characters thrown at the screen.

The original players are back - Brendan Fraser as the wisecracking spy-archaeologist-mummyfighter.  John Hannah as Fraser’s long-suffering, greedy but good at heart brother-in law.  Maria Bello stands in for Rachel Weisz, and that’s a decent switch.  Rachel Weisz does absolutely nothing for me, whereas I do like Maria Bello.  But, like the other characters, she is given just about nothing to do.  Thrown into the mix this time are Luke Ford as Fraser and Bello’s son, a…dashing archaeologist.  Almost the exact same story as Indiana Jones 4.  Then there is Isabella Leong, who is thousands of years old and guards the emperor’s tomb.  Her mother (Michelle Yeoh) also guards the tomb.  And then there’s an ancient Chinese general, a double-crossing museum curator, and the emperor himself.  Jet Li.

Everything about this movie is dreadful.  Great actors like Michelle Yeoh, Maria Bello and Jet Li are given, basically, nothing to do.  Every other actor is a cartoon.  Especially Luke Ford, who exudes the personality of a wet towel as the most boring “dashing archaeologist” of all time.  Somehow, this two-thousand-year-old woman falls in love with this tofu-stir-fry of a man.  How does this happen?  I think it all took place when he said “golly, I think you’re neat”.  And BAM!  Love.  The set-up involves Fraser and Bello being recruited to transport some kind of artifact to China.  Why them?  Well, the bad guy made sure it would be them.  Why did he do that?  Well, so they could be in the movie, of course.  And that’s about the extent of the logic that goes on here.  Until the Abominable Snowmen show up to put the narrative back on the straight and narrow.  No, really.  The Yeti come.

So we get some kind of ancient mystical cryptic secret.  Luke Ford, the linoleum floor of dashing archaeologists, has uncovered the Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.  Who is Jet Li.  The woman who defends the tomb attacks him.  But then they fall in love when the bad guys show up and have this crystal thing, and it opens the emperor’s sarcophagus and removes the curse that was placed on him thousands of years ago.  Why do they do this?  Because the crazy army guy thinks that the world needs a crazy emperor.  Which is fine.  We DO need a crazy emperor who can somehow shoot fire from his eyes and create icicles with his mind.  So far so good.  Well, so bad.  But it gets worse.

It turns out that the emperor (who is still a computer-generated Jet Li) needs to get to some kind of gateway in the mountains (the YETI mountains) with his crystal.  And if he arrives there, and puts the crystal in the hole, ALL will be LOST!  So he gets there and puts the crystal in the hole, and…oh.  It just shows him where he needs to go now.  But if he gets THERE, and drinks from the water, he will become immortal and be able to turn into a dragon, and ALL will be LOST!  So he gets to the cave, drinks the water, and…oh.  It turns out that NOW, all he needs to do is raise his army and cross the Great Wall of China, and then ALL will be LOST!

It really seems like they are making this movie up as they go along.  The emperor gets to a certain place, and they realize that the movie has only been going for half an hour, and they need to make it longer.  So they create another crisis and another trek and add more and more characters.  At the end of the film, they have the same problem - it isn’t yet long enough - so they pad it with a really cheesy, lame computer-generated battle between armies of the undead.  And then - the one moment that could have saved this movie!  Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh, two of the greatest actors in the history of kung-fu movies, are going to have a sword fight!  And…ugh.  The sword fight is six thrusts, six parries, and forty-eight jump cuts.  We have NO idea what’s going on! 

And that’s the problem with most of this movie.  This is a non-stop, beginning to end action movie.  So at the very least, it should involve compelling action.  But this movie is directed by Rob Cohen.  The guy behind The Fast And The Furious.  And it looks like a crappy music video.  So many jump cuts, so much frenetic editing, that we never, ever know what’s actually going on.  When you have Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh who are going to fight with swords, you know what you could do?  Nothing.  Just get out of the way, point one camera at them, and let them go.  They know what they’re doing.  But Cohen obviously couldn’t leave well enough alone, and the charm and excitement are completely sucked out of this film.

When I started watching Exiled, the latest Chinese action film from director Johnnie To (who is very good), for the first time in a long time I found myself wishing desperately that I spoke Cantonese. I figured that if I spoke Cantonese, I would have some idea what the hell was going on. For the first forty-five minutes of the film, I was basically lost as to the plot. And what was most irritating was that even if I spoke Cantonese, I would still likely not have understood. There was so little dialogue, and so much sweeping camera work that the story is moved along almost exclusively in pictures. Which were impressive. The camera work here is terrific, and in some cases, breathtaking. But that does not tell the story. The movie opens with four guys following a fifth guy into his house, at which point they even up the odds and have a gun fight. When they see this fifth guy’s wife and baby, they stop their gunfight, repair the bullet holes in the house, and they all sit down to dinner. What? They go see another guy, then that guy sees another guy, who’s talking to the boss who keeps phoning one of the original four guys…it seems bonkers.

In fact, I learned more about the plot from reading the back of the box than I did from watching the film. I can only surmise that the blurb written on the back of the DVD case was written by the director himself, or at the very least someone who spoke Cantonese. Because I would be amazed if anyone sitting here in Canada or the U.S. could have figured it out. It turns out that two of the four guys were there to kill the fifth, and the other two were there to protect him. And in order to make sure that his wife and baby are provided for, the fifth man suggests that all five of them pull off one last big score before he is executed so his wife and baby will have something to live on. Again, I got this from the back of the case, and not from the movie itself.

My girlfriend gave up. After half an hour, she was totally lost, and even the occasional brief gun fight could no longer pique her interest. My commitment was a little greater. I figured that if Alliance Atlantis was giving me the DVD to review, the least I could do would be to sit through it. And am I ever glad I did! From the forty-five minute mark on, the movie makes sense. And by the end of it, the whole thing makes sense, and you have forgotten that painful first forty minutes or so. The main reason is the five main actors, who are all terrific. I’m not going to attempt to write their names down here any more than I plan to try to pronounce them on the air, but all five are wonderful. They are so convincing as buddies and equally convincing as enemies. Equal part good guy and bad guy, the killers and thieves with a certain ambiguous morality…I think I have written something a lot like this recently. Sound familiar?

Well, the Chinese certainly love their American westerns, and Exiled is no exception. The main characters are very reminiscent of Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch, there is a scene where a gun keeps being shot away from a soldier that is taken directly from a scene between Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef (with a hat, not a gun) in For a Few Dollars More. And the final scene is straight out of the Wild Bunch as well. Oops. For those of you who have SEEN The Wild Bunch, that may have given away the ending somewhat. Sorry. The main problem with Exiled is that the second half is far superior to the first, yet the second half would not work at all without the beginning. So you can’t just skip to 44:15 and start watching. I give the first half four out of ten, the second half eight out of ten, which overall gives the movie six out of ten. Makes sense, right? Exiled comes out on Tuesday, January 15th.