Mummy Returns

It's fucking war. It's me versus AMC Theaters. Yeah, they're bigger than me, but they're almost bankrupt and I've been able to squirrel away almost $300 since I've been working more at First American Video.

It's fucking war and it's going to be bloodier and uglier than a live birth. It all started when I went to see The Mummy Returns yesterday. See, those bean-counters at AMC promise you free movies if you sign up for their "Moviewatcher" club. You get a card with a magnetic strip and God knows what they do with it. I bet they track you everywhere you go and sell your information to time share salesmen and telemarketers with speech impediments. But, that's not what pisses me off. What really boils my cock is how the free movie tickets are worthless shit.

I have two "free" movie tickets in my pocket as my "reward" for frequently fighting with the surly teenagers who take the tickets, telling the yammering idiots in the theater to shut the hell up, and for making threatening gestures at the three-year-old in the R-rated movie who kicks the back of my seat. But, the "rewards" are only good for movies that have been out more than two weeks. What the fuck is the point of rewarding people who go to the movies a lot with tickets for flicks they've most likely already seen? Doesn't it stand to reason that the "frequent" moviegoer sees things in its first two weeks of release? The reward stands to least benefit the people that AMC pretends they appreciate most. Fuckers.

The problem is compounded by Hitler, Jr., the fat, pushy kid who delights in checking tickets to make sure you're seeing the movie you paid for. If this disgusting tub of dictatorial goo would just mellow out, then I could get into The Mummy Returns using the tickets for Town & Country I got for free. Hey, Hitler, Jr., this was your chance to right a wrong, to stop being such a smug little prick who delights in keeping me out of the movies. This was your opportunity to disavow your past and overturn the Axis Powers of AMC, Mann and UA. You could have done your small part to right the wrong, but instead, you said "Fuck you, Filthy" and sent me back to the box office to pay six bucks for the matinee.

And The Mummy Returns isn't worth that kind of money. It's not an awful film, actually, it's just not very good or original; it's what happens when you have unlimited money and seriously limited imagination.

I won't go into too much detail with the plot because it's so contrived and ridiculous that you'll only end up hurting yourself if you try to follow it. There's something about bad people trying to revive the Scorpion King (The Rock), who led the undead army of the god Anubis. But, if Imhotep (a sort-of chubby Arnold Vosloo) can defeat The Rock in a fight, he can lead the army, and take over the world. Then there is some nonsense about reincarnating his wife, a very hot Patricia Velazquez, so they can rule together. Also, Brendan Fraser is back as a low-rent Indiana Jones who now has an annoying son with smart-mouth dialogue taken straight from "Home Improvement" reruns. He and his wife, Rachel Weisz, have to stop Vosloo and the Rock, along with countless other underdeveloped villains. And, to make it all the more confusing, there is some lip service paid to Fraser and his son being "chosen ones," or some such crap. Not that anything ever comes of that.

The main problem is that all that silly plotting is there because writer/director Stephen Sommers had all these ideas for action sequences and then he cooked up a harebrained plot to justify it. I mean, this is more a mediocre special effects demo reel than it is a story. It's perfect for people who love action and have cerebral meningitis, or parasites that have eaten the part of the brain that controls logical thinking. You might say, "wow, that looks great," but you won't ever say, "holy shit is this exciting." Because it isn't. The action is so incessant and so arbitrary that it becomes tedious. It would have been nice to give a flying fuck about at least one character, but the The Mummy Returns is too busy getting shit blown up to bother with character development.

It also would have been nice for there to be some creativity. How can Hollywood spend a hundred-million bones and not even have some new ideas. Fuck, with about ten dollars worth of beer in me on a Friday night, I got all kinds of new ideas. The Mummy Returns is big-ass action, but it's all borrowed. You've seen it before, so you don't wonder whether the skull the camera lingers on will open its eyes; it's just a question of when. And rather than surprise us with new monsters or exciting chills, all it does is give us the same shit over and over, bigger and bigger. Bigger is better for dicks, tits and cakes, but there isn't a whole lot more excitement to be gained by seeing 1000 computer-generated warriors ten times than by seeing 100 actually do something interesting.

And fuck is this movie long. Long after it's used up its tricks, it keeps going. There isn't one climactic fight, there are about three and there is nothing at stake in any of them. Sure there's a lot of fighting, but we know who is going to win, and Sommers doesn't have the courtesy of throwing a monkey wrenches in to make us wonder. The only good fights are between Weisz and Velazquez, two hot chicks in bikinis and with swords, just like in my fantasies.

Oh, yeah, people are making a big-ass deal out of The Rock, but he's in the movie maybe ten minutes. And of that, he is computer-generated for five minutes. The CGI version of him looks more like a plastic action figure than a human being. It's fucking lame.

Two Fingers for The Mummy Returns, plenty of action and no brain, which is fine for a porno, but unfortunately, this isn't one.