We meet again the old characters, but now Rick (Brendan Fraser) and Evelyn (Maria Bello) O’Connell are retired from adventures; they have a grown-up son, Alex (Luke Ford) who is an archeologist and thinks he has found the over-2000-year-old mummy of a Chinese Emperor (Jet Li). Jonathan (John Hannah) is in China too, what a coincidence.
The emperor not only wanted to conquer all of China, but he also wanted to be immortal, so he sent his general to fetch the sorceress. Zi Yuan (Michelle Yeoh) and the general fell in love, but the emperor wanted her for himself so he killed him and tried to kill her too, but she had cast a curse on him and his army.
- and if anyone says ‘yet again a woman causes trouble’ I shall get furious, because once more the woman didn’t, actually she would have avoided it quickly making her choice right away, choosing the general, if only the emperor wasn’t once more the arrogant bully who wants to take by force whatever he wants.
The O’Connell are given a precious diamond and asked to take it to China. They reunite right away with Jonathan and Alex (is there only one club in China?) and they are later attacked by a friend and by a general who wants to bring the emperor back to life. They sort of wake him up but he’s yet not human nor immortal.
They all go to a place somewhere in Himalaya where they fight again. Zi Yuan’s daughter Li who has watched over the emperor’s mummy (more like a terracotta statue actually..) for 2000 years now goes with them, and Alex falls in love with her. There, the emperor uses the diamond to see the way to Shangri-la, and Li summons three yetis to help them in the fight. Rick is injured saving his son’s life, and they take him to Shangri-la where Zi Yuan is still alive, and he is saved. The emperor comes too, and bathing in Shangri-la waters he is no more a terracotta-statue, he is now a shapeshifter, for some reason, and escapes turning into a three-headed-dragon.. and for some reason he kidnaps Li.
They all head back to the emperor’s tomb where he calls out his terracotta army with the intent to walk over the Great Wall and become invincible.. not sure why stepping on the other side of the wall should make them all invincible, but that’s out it is apparently.
Zi Yuan gives up her own immortality, as well as her daughter’s, in order to summon the skeletons of all the people killed by the emperor and buried all together - although I understood that they were buried inside the Great Wall, not all around it, and all on the same side of it..
A big army rises, guided by the emperor’s ex-general, Lin’s father.
The skeleton-army fights the terracotta-army. Obviously no side can actually win, but they succeed in keeping back the terracotta-army preventing them from crossing the Great Wall.
Alex of course saves Lin. Zi Yuan fights against the emperor, and seeing the cursed dagger at his side, apparently the only weapon that can kill him, she lets him kill her in order to get close enough to get it, and he doesn’t notice. She gives the dagger to our heroes before dying, but Lin’s crying too much to bother over it, so the O’Connell men take it and go after the emperor.
They find him ‘inside’ the Great Wall, not sure why, what was he doing wasting time there instead of crossing to the other side right away and become unstoppable, other than waiting for them to stop him??
Rick stabs his shoulder.. admittedly he had turned into some kind of beast, but still that was clearly not the heart. During the fight the dagger is broken. Alex takes one peace of it, and when Rick notices he takes the other piece, and they stab the emperor at the same time, one from the back and one from the front, with such precision that the dagger’s parts hit themselves.. how lucky.
As soon as the emperor dies once and for all, his terracotta-army crumbles, and the skeleton-army vanishes into dust - without even a father-daughter nod of salute.
Lin is now mortal and can have her romantic relationship with Alex, while Jonathan hurriedly leaves China, tired of mummies, and relocates to Perù. We read on screed that shortly after, mummies were discovered in Perù.. and this might be the only nice thought, since mummies were really discovered in Perù, or Chile, but I still didn’t laugh because everything had been so boring and absurd...
The yetis... I mean, really, Lin calls for help, apparently having some sort of magic herself, although she never uses it again, and three yetis arrive, and they move like very tall men with a white pelt on, jumping and kicking and punching.. :-/
The yetis carry Rick’s body to Shangri-la and then they disappear, meaning that we see nothing more of them, I guess they went back to their comfortable icy mountains. Rick is saved... how? They said that he’s only hope was Shangri-la: was that because there was nothing nearer, and he got cured ‘naturally’, he was nursed back to life, or was he magically saved by Shangri-la’s water?? Honestly by the tone Lin used, I thought that a miracle was needed so I’d say : saved by the water, but then shouldn’t he be immortal? Or you become immortal only if you want? I don’t know.
Alex retrieved the statue of a man driving a carriage with a coffin, presumably with the emperor inside the coffin, who knows why he assumes that. It turns out that it was all a decoy, and the emperor was actually the driver... why did he need a decoy? didn’t he want to be revived? and how did he manage it, since he was in his palace when he turned, and his army was outside?
The bad general uses Evelyn’s blood to open a thing that can only be opened with the blood of a pure-hearted... leaving aside the matter of how dangerous it often is in movies to have a pure heart, she’s chosen because she was ready to protect her husband with her own life, so they say she ‘must’ have a pure heart... and how stupid is that. Maybe it could be true had she done so for some adult stranger, but everybody even villains may have one person they care about.
Rick and Evelyn didn’t look old enough to be Alex’s parents: how old was Alex supposed to be? He didn’t look like a kid, he could have been Rick’s brother :-/
Ford was so very plain in this movie, and the O’Connell’s scene at the beginning, when they pretend to refuse the task because they promised to give up adventures, is very lame; the acting is so artificial, maybe intending to be funny I don’t know, but they clearly long for adventures: that’s because they’re so lucky they always get out safe and sound.
There’s the boring son-that-wants-to-be-consider-an-adult vs parents-who-treat-him-like-a-child theme, although it seems totally unjustified. It’s not like he was kept in a safe bubble at home, he was out there doing what he wanted, but I think that this served to make the final father-son-battling-together-scene more meaningful in their eyes.. not in mine. Li or Zi Yuan should have killed him. Had Zi Yuan no more magic in her? She gave up her immortality, but what about her powers?
Lin would have been the better choice, having prepared for it for 2000 years, and yet the man that has lived comfortably for years and his archeologist son manage to kill a shapeshifting warrior that no warrior could ever defeat before..
It was so boring, it was a complete waste of time.
ITA La mummia-la tomba dell’imperatore dragone
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