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.

The working title for the new film Shattered was Butterfly On a Wheel. That would have been a better title, because it would have made no sense. The inclusion of the phrase in the movie also makes no sense. The full quote is “who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel”, and it comes from a poem by Alexander Pope called “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”, which is a true classic in the world of poetry. In it’s context in the poem, it refers to an enemy of Pope’s. His doctor (Dr. Arbothnot, it would seem) had warned him about the dangers of composing poems that attacked his peers in society, and so Pope responded by sending him a series of poems that attacked these people. The line, used in it’s proper context, refers to a wheel, the medieval torture device, which seems excessive when used to destroy a butterfly, and exists as a testament to the cruelty and excessive nature of one who would do such a thing. As my friend Kent used to say “it’s like swatting a fly with a Buick”.

In it’s context in the movie, the line is meant to be taken differently. Gerard Butler and Maria Bello play a married couple with a charming young daughter, who is captured by a sociopathic Pierce Brosnan, who holds her for ransom. Before long, it becomes clear that Brosnan is not in this for money, but rather for some kind of personal vendetta against this family. He will kill their daughter, you see, unless Bello and Butler jump through all kinds of hoops. It sets up a Sophie’s Choice-style dilemma…what would you do to save your child? Would you kill an innocent person? And other such light-hearted fare. The quote from Pope comes up again and again, but it is fairly misused. The idea behind it in the film is that this couple are the butterfly, and are so insignificant to Brosnan that he can toy with them, as he would a butterfly upon a wheel. And he is so cruel crazy and evil that he is willing to toruture them in this excessive way. This seems to be the correct interpretation of the quote. However, the twist at the end changes things, and the quote all of a sudden becomes terribly misused.

Ah, yes. The TWIST at the END. I can’t review this movie very well without giving away the ending, and I am tempted to do so because this is one of those irritating by-the-numbers twist-ending movies. I will not, because I’m sure some people will watch and enjoy this. But there have been so many movies made in this style, especially since the success of The Usual Suspects. And there have been many that were better than Shattered. Derailed was better than this movie. Here’s the problem with this twist ending. The director paid a lot of attention to the mechanics of the twist. He went into the movie knowing the ending, and made sure that if you watch the movie again, the right things happen at the right time. It all makes sense mechanically. Yes, that guy could have said that thing to that lady while the other guy was over here. Fine. But the emotional reactions of the people involved are not so closely monitored. Knowing what we know (at the end, and maybe quite a bit earlier), the reactions of the key people in key situations are not what they should be. And the contrivances of the plot, which seems (at the end) to have been so meticulously planned out, seem so forced. If one of the characters involved did anything, at certain points, other than what they actually did in that situation, the whole plan could not have proceeded as it did.

I know, this all sounds so vague. If that guy and this guy had talked to this guy instead of that guy…this is because I think people might actually watch the film and enjoy it. And there are some good things to work with here. Maria Bello is terrific in her role as the terrorized mom, and Gerard Bulter has moments of great acting as well. But overall, this is simply an obvious, pain-by-numbers BIG TWIST movie, where the twist at the end becomes the only reason any of the movie was ever made. And that is obnoxious. Imagine…Eric Clapton going through the motions on Layla just so he could get to that piano part.