Post by Harkovast on Dec 22, 2014 21:25:33 GMT
Let's face it, The Mummy movies were always pretty shitty.
They were unoriginal, lazy and far too reliant on ethnic stereotypes.
Americans were all dim witted, gung ho, gun wielding bad asses, French people are snivelling cowards, the English are effeminate and foppish and dark skinned, arab types are entirely expendable.
Tomb of the Dragon Emperor continues these proud traditions while making the whole empty, soulless affair seem more lifeless than ever.
This time the setting moves to China where Jet Li plays the first Emperor of China (here called the Dragon Emperor because...it sounds scary? I dunno.)
The movie starts out as what seems to be some kind of Chinese historical epic, with Jet Li conquering China before getting cursed to become an undead mummy and his armies turned to terracotta statues.
Now that might not sound that bad so far, it certainly beats a text crawl....but this sequence goes on for 15 minutes! Yes, really! 15 minutes of stuff that is clearly just setting up how the guy becomes a mummy featuring people and places that we all know will not be in the rest of the movie.
When the title FINALLY appears, I felt completely disorientated. Oh yeah, I'm watching the Mummy 3 aren't I?
Darn...that means only one thing....
Brendan Frasier.
George, George, George of the Jungle, strong as he can be.
Who has ever been able to take this guy seriously as an action star? He just looks funny and goofy no matter what he's doing. Having him grab swords or duel wield gun or punch a mummy cant hide the fact that this guy is not a convincing action star. The movies have been trying to make me take this character seriously for three movies now and it still isn't working. You might as well put a head band on Jim Carey and call him the new Rambo.
Here he teams up with his son from the previous film who seems to have aged about 18 years while Brendan has stayed exactly the same age. Unless these guys are meant to be Ano-Chee, I am not buying this shitty casting.
The film proceeds to trot out every cliché about China that it thinks the audience might have heard of.
Emperor, terra cotta soldiers, the great wall and fire works all feature prominently. It feels like they are running down a check list.
Let's make a movie about Napoleon, he can fight a battle at the Eiffel Tower, then have to save the Mona Lisa and the Arc De Triomphe before stopping off at Disney Land Paris. As long as you keep urgently throwing these things in that the audience have heard of no one will notice how shoddy your movie is...right?
The casual racism returns as during one battle the bad guys deflects a laughably over sized fire work that the heroes fire at him and it hits a tram full of people and blows them up! Holy shit! The movie makers try showing a couple of people jumping out afterwards but the pyrotechnics were so massive it is impossible to believe that a large number of civilians didn't just died.
Do our heroes care that their casual use of explosives in the crowded street just killed a ton of people? Do they fuck. If the dead aren't white, it will be alright (at least in these movies.)
The bit where the movie truly starts to turn into a parody of itself is during a battle at a Buddhist temple on a mountain (yes another cliché for you there) our heroes are rescued from soldiers by a horde of CGI yetis.
Fucking CGI yetis.
At this point I was starting to think "are they just trying to fuck up these movies on purpose now?"
But shit CGI has been ruining these movies all along. Excessive, obvious and self indulgent CGI makes a lot of the battles in this franchise look like a crappy play station 2 game. The ending to the second film was entirely ruined by replacing the fist fight with the wrestler the Rock that the audience had been looking forward to with a huge, super fakey CGI scorpion bodied version of the Rock. It looked so fake if I had been the director I would have headed to my trailer with a revolver, a bullet and a bottle of whisky to do the honourable thing.
Speaking of honour, the film cant get its racist clichés straight by the end.
The Hero calls out the bad guy to fight him "honourably", rather than just blast him with magic. Fortunately, the Dragon Emperor confuses racist stereotypes of the Japanese and Chinese (just as the film makers do) and this somehow works....even though the film gives the impression the Emperor does not speak English...I guess this cliché is so strong it can cross language barriers.
Mind you, the Emperors magic is so inconsistent that I am genuinely not 100% if he could magic Brendan Fraser to death at this point.
Sometimes he can do telekinesis with a flick of his hand, or turn into a giant, shitty looking CGI dragon, other times he throws crappy fireballs that never hit and take a full five seconds to charge up before he throws them. Other time he just does kung fu and swords fights. How powerful is this guy meant to be? What are the rules or limits of his powers? I have no idea and (once again) neither do the film makers.
The movie ends with a big battle as a hordes of invincible undead warriors come out from under the great wall to fight the Emperors tens of thousands of terracotta soldiers.
Now the undead are shown to be invincible (they get shot full of arrows, even right through the head, and just set to work pulling them out) while the terracotta soldiers seem to crumble at the slightest damage.
The undead are the good guys....
So waves and waves of useless bad guys rush against the undead, get smashed to bits, and then loads more run in.
Both armies are dusty brown coloured, thus making it impossible to tell how the battle is progressing, who is winning or what's going on.
I assume the undead are winning, but there are so many terracotta soldiers here that I am honestly not sure if they are making any impact.
And all this is (naturally) rendered in shitty CGI to make it as cartoonish, unclear and unexciting as possible.
It is like someone sat down and tried to make the least exciting end battle they could think of.
I can think of how to make this movies ending better right now. I thought of this while typing this out.
The undead are not invincible. Tons of them get shot with arrows and then they start getting over run by the emperors unstoppable legions. They fight a brave last stand but are rapidly getting hacked to bits. The Emperor gloats that "Nothing can stop me now" but then get defeated by our hero just before his army triumphs.
Instead, when the Emperor dies you get the sense that it just saved the undead another two hours of smashing useless clay soldiers.
A final, minor point, is right at the end of the movie.
One of the good guys says he is going to head to Peru, where there are no mummies.
A message than comes up on screen saying "shortly after, mummies were found in Peru"
Well thanks a bunch movie.
Thanks for explaining the fucking joke.
What might have been a slightly amusing little final line that savy audience members would pick up on, this movie has to spell everything out.
This stupid little bit sums up what is wrong with the whole movie and this whole franchise.
They treat the audience like morons throughout, constantly explaining every detail and putting in only the most obvious cultural references.
And apparently they are planning a reboot.
Now that really is a frightening example of something coming back from the dead!
They were unoriginal, lazy and far too reliant on ethnic stereotypes.
Americans were all dim witted, gung ho, gun wielding bad asses, French people are snivelling cowards, the English are effeminate and foppish and dark skinned, arab types are entirely expendable.
Tomb of the Dragon Emperor continues these proud traditions while making the whole empty, soulless affair seem more lifeless than ever.
This time the setting moves to China where Jet Li plays the first Emperor of China (here called the Dragon Emperor because...it sounds scary? I dunno.)
The movie starts out as what seems to be some kind of Chinese historical epic, with Jet Li conquering China before getting cursed to become an undead mummy and his armies turned to terracotta statues.
Now that might not sound that bad so far, it certainly beats a text crawl....but this sequence goes on for 15 minutes! Yes, really! 15 minutes of stuff that is clearly just setting up how the guy becomes a mummy featuring people and places that we all know will not be in the rest of the movie.
When the title FINALLY appears, I felt completely disorientated. Oh yeah, I'm watching the Mummy 3 aren't I?
Darn...that means only one thing....
Brendan Frasier.
George, George, George of the Jungle, strong as he can be.
Who has ever been able to take this guy seriously as an action star? He just looks funny and goofy no matter what he's doing. Having him grab swords or duel wield gun or punch a mummy cant hide the fact that this guy is not a convincing action star. The movies have been trying to make me take this character seriously for three movies now and it still isn't working. You might as well put a head band on Jim Carey and call him the new Rambo.
Here he teams up with his son from the previous film who seems to have aged about 18 years while Brendan has stayed exactly the same age. Unless these guys are meant to be Ano-Chee, I am not buying this shitty casting.
The film proceeds to trot out every cliché about China that it thinks the audience might have heard of.
Emperor, terra cotta soldiers, the great wall and fire works all feature prominently. It feels like they are running down a check list.
Let's make a movie about Napoleon, he can fight a battle at the Eiffel Tower, then have to save the Mona Lisa and the Arc De Triomphe before stopping off at Disney Land Paris. As long as you keep urgently throwing these things in that the audience have heard of no one will notice how shoddy your movie is...right?
The casual racism returns as during one battle the bad guys deflects a laughably over sized fire work that the heroes fire at him and it hits a tram full of people and blows them up! Holy shit! The movie makers try showing a couple of people jumping out afterwards but the pyrotechnics were so massive it is impossible to believe that a large number of civilians didn't just died.
Do our heroes care that their casual use of explosives in the crowded street just killed a ton of people? Do they fuck. If the dead aren't white, it will be alright (at least in these movies.)
The bit where the movie truly starts to turn into a parody of itself is during a battle at a Buddhist temple on a mountain (yes another cliché for you there) our heroes are rescued from soldiers by a horde of CGI yetis.
Fucking CGI yetis.
At this point I was starting to think "are they just trying to fuck up these movies on purpose now?"
But shit CGI has been ruining these movies all along. Excessive, obvious and self indulgent CGI makes a lot of the battles in this franchise look like a crappy play station 2 game. The ending to the second film was entirely ruined by replacing the fist fight with the wrestler the Rock that the audience had been looking forward to with a huge, super fakey CGI scorpion bodied version of the Rock. It looked so fake if I had been the director I would have headed to my trailer with a revolver, a bullet and a bottle of whisky to do the honourable thing.
Speaking of honour, the film cant get its racist clichés straight by the end.
The Hero calls out the bad guy to fight him "honourably", rather than just blast him with magic. Fortunately, the Dragon Emperor confuses racist stereotypes of the Japanese and Chinese (just as the film makers do) and this somehow works....even though the film gives the impression the Emperor does not speak English...I guess this cliché is so strong it can cross language barriers.
Mind you, the Emperors magic is so inconsistent that I am genuinely not 100% if he could magic Brendan Fraser to death at this point.
Sometimes he can do telekinesis with a flick of his hand, or turn into a giant, shitty looking CGI dragon, other times he throws crappy fireballs that never hit and take a full five seconds to charge up before he throws them. Other time he just does kung fu and swords fights. How powerful is this guy meant to be? What are the rules or limits of his powers? I have no idea and (once again) neither do the film makers.
The movie ends with a big battle as a hordes of invincible undead warriors come out from under the great wall to fight the Emperors tens of thousands of terracotta soldiers.
Now the undead are shown to be invincible (they get shot full of arrows, even right through the head, and just set to work pulling them out) while the terracotta soldiers seem to crumble at the slightest damage.
The undead are the good guys....
So waves and waves of useless bad guys rush against the undead, get smashed to bits, and then loads more run in.
Both armies are dusty brown coloured, thus making it impossible to tell how the battle is progressing, who is winning or what's going on.
I assume the undead are winning, but there are so many terracotta soldiers here that I am honestly not sure if they are making any impact.
And all this is (naturally) rendered in shitty CGI to make it as cartoonish, unclear and unexciting as possible.
It is like someone sat down and tried to make the least exciting end battle they could think of.
I can think of how to make this movies ending better right now. I thought of this while typing this out.
The undead are not invincible. Tons of them get shot with arrows and then they start getting over run by the emperors unstoppable legions. They fight a brave last stand but are rapidly getting hacked to bits. The Emperor gloats that "Nothing can stop me now" but then get defeated by our hero just before his army triumphs.
Instead, when the Emperor dies you get the sense that it just saved the undead another two hours of smashing useless clay soldiers.
A final, minor point, is right at the end of the movie.
One of the good guys says he is going to head to Peru, where there are no mummies.
A message than comes up on screen saying "shortly after, mummies were found in Peru"
Well thanks a bunch movie.
Thanks for explaining the fucking joke.
What might have been a slightly amusing little final line that savy audience members would pick up on, this movie has to spell everything out.
This stupid little bit sums up what is wrong with the whole movie and this whole franchise.
They treat the audience like morons throughout, constantly explaining every detail and putting in only the most obvious cultural references.
And apparently they are planning a reboot.
Now that really is a frightening example of something coming back from the dead!