With their ten-year-old son Alex (Freddie Boath) in tow, adventurer Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his archeologist wife (Rachel Weisz) accidentally trigger a chain reaction that will awaken the slumbering Scorpion King (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), whose ancient army threatens to destroy the world. Meanwhile, the mummified high priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) is resurrected by the reincarnation of his lost love Anck-Su-Namun (Patricia Velasquez), who wants the power of the Scorpion King for herself.
Here’s the thing about The Mummy Returns – Brendan Fraser is having so much fun that it’s very easy to overlook the fact that this film isn’t really very good at all. The first film was lightning in a bottle, clipping along without any dead weight and taking itself seriously enough that the audience could play along too. The Mummy Returns is, plainly put, bonkers; very little of it makes sense outside of the immediate scene you’re watching, and while it does obey its own internal logic, it’s akin to the logic of a dream, where details only connect if you force them together.
The Mummy Returns is full of, for lack of a better word, stuff. There’s a trio of brigands who never accomplish their disparate missions before Imhotep summarily dispatches them; an indestructible hot air balloon; a tribe of shrunken-head pygmy mummies; a sinister museum curator who never does any curating; an implicit prophecy regarding Rick O’Connell’s destiny; and no fewer than two distinct reincarnation subplots, neither of which fazes anyone in the film. These are all things that occur, in roughly this order, and no one comments on the fact that these things simply happen. I suppose that, after the events of The Mummy, these characters are well and truly prepared for anything, yet it’s hard to fathom anyone simply accepting this many unexplained phenomena in the span of one week. Recall that everything spectacular in The Mummy came back to Imhotep; here, there are so many supernatural forces jousting that the plot feels like a staged production at Pharoahic Times.
So the plot doesn’t make much sense, a collection of bits rather than an integrated narrative, but I’m not entirely sure that one comes to a mummy film with “coherent plot” high on the list. The action sequences are a notch better than the ones in the adventure-heavy Mummy, and it seems we can’t go fifteen minutes without something spectacular happening on screen. As much of an intellectual chore as the movie can become, requiring leaps of logic and credulity, the action scenes are well-staged, particularly an early banger in which the crew are accosted by mummies aboard a double-decker bus. This flavor of action doesn’t align with the gee-whiz thrills of the first film, but it’s respectably dynamic and worth rewatching out of context. So too the pygmy mummy attack, which makes not a lick of sense in the structure of the film and has no real purpose for being there, but which is nevertheless suitably creepy and electrifying on its own merits.
Perhaps the biggest problem with The Mummy Returns is that it is never quite a mummy movie. Imhotep’s reanimation and revivification feels perfunctory, designed to move the character as quickly as possible into position as a comic book supervillain. As much as the film outfits itself with the trappings of reincarnation and dynastic Egypt, it has no larger theme or purpose for these matters beyond the fact that they were principal concerns of the first film. The Mummy Returns is a cliché of a sequel, doing it all over again but only a little bit differently – and losing so much of the magic in the process. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a gag near the climax in which young Alex struggles to read the hieroglyph “Amenophus”; Jonathan gleefully reminds us that he too had the same problem in the first film. But beyond the surface-level pleasure of remembering better days, The Mummy Returns is serving only lukewarm leftovers.
Put another way, The Mummy remains one of my favorite films of all time, yet The Mummy Returns is little better than a footnote, as if to say, “Oh, yes, and they made another one, too.”
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