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The Mummy Returns
***
Cinema
Releases - May 18, 2001
Certificate 12. 130 minutes. Written and directed
by Stephen Sommers. Starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah, Arnold
Vosloo, Freddie Boath, The Rock.
Ah, they spend much money on special effects these
days, and yet so many of them are made up of ugly digital pixels, or come
in clunky action sequences where we can see the money on the screen but don't
feel any stirring in our guts.
"The Mummy Returns", a sequel to
the 1999 remake of the 1932 classic, is a terrific example of how to make
a movie that relies on special effects and still has the power to excite
us. Stephen Sommers, the writer and director, clearly spends long nights
thinking up the most imaginative ways to spend the money of Universal Pictures,
crafting exquisite set pieces in his mind. It's not many films where in one
twenty-minute stretch we get a martial arts fight in a house, a gunfight
over a satanic ritual in a museum back room, and goblins chasing heroes across
the streets of London as they ride in a stolen double-decker
bus.
Too much action can get repetitive and boring;
"The Mummy Returns" avoids this by constantly changing tempo. We get those
fight fights, gunfights, chases and goblins, and also sandstorms, floods,
body transformations, explosions and out-of-control oceans, in mansions,
hot water balloons, oases and temples. You'll know if this isn't your thing.
Me, I think that when it's done well it can be a whole lot of fun. "The Mummy
Returns" flows with a good degree of energy and the special effects are such
an integral part of the visual construction that we don't even think about
them, except for in one botched scene near the end, where a giant scorpion
with a human face looks like some kind of grotesque balloon
animal.
The movie does have breaks for air, with simple
but entertaining banter between charming, good-looking stars (it's hard for
any movie to be all that bad when it features Rachel Weisz), and the same
kind of aura as the Indiana Jones pictures. Okay, so it's Indy Light, but
a watered down version of something great can still be very
good.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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