The Mummy Returns Is An Overstuffed But Mostly Diverting Follow-Up

Once The Mummy premiered in May 1999 to solid reviews and strong box office, well, we all know what was bound to come next....a sequel! Just as The Mummy had returned for four further adventures in the 1940's after the initial 1932 Mummy movie, Brendan Fraser and pals would also be coming back to the silver screen to fight more undead baddies in another motion picture. Per usual for typical summer blockbuster sequels, the scope and budget was enlarged, though, also like many summer blockbuster sequels, the results weren't exactly better than its predecessor despite a grander size in the production.


A number of years have passed since the initial Mummy movie, though Rick (Brendan Fraser) and Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) are still a couple and even now have a kid, Alex (Freddie Boath) whom they take on their archeological expeditions to various historically important sites. An artifact the trio have covered, a bracelet belonging to a being known as The Scorpion King (Dwayne Johnson) attracts the attention of some unsavory folks who are also planning to bring Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) back to life.  This pack of ne'er-do-wells is led by the reincarnated form of Anck-Su-Namun (Patricia Velasquez), Imhotep's lover.

Once Imhotep is resurrected, this Mummy kidnaps Alex (who has the bracelet strapped to his arm) and it's now up to Rick and Evelyn to go on another globe-trotting adventure to save their child and stop Imhotep from unleashing all sorts of mystical chaos on the world. Plenty of chase sequences, mystical mayhem and a whole bunch of early 21st century CGI (I'd wager at least a whole third of the final half-hour of this movie is just CGI) ensues in the process, with the plot of The Mummy Returns constantly tossing new obstacles, characters and mythological elements into its narrative pot to the point that the movie can't help but feel quite crowded.

Some of those numerous new elements are fun to watch, such as a pilot who holds a grudge against Rick or some tiny creatures the cast encounters in the jungle that end up going on a killing spree. Other facets of the plot don't fare as well, namely anything related to weird retcons for Rick and Evelyn as characters, whose backstories get tired into the deeper mythology of the franchise. Evelyn is the reincarnated form of an Egyptian who had a feud with Anck-Su-Namun while Rick has a tattoo on his arm connecting him to ancient order that is tasked with protecting the world from all sorts of ancient evil.

Neither of these plot details are all that interesting and they just come off as weird attempts to make everything connected for the sake of tidiness when the everyman nature of these characters in the original movie was a key component of why they worked so well. Another newer feature brought to The Mummy Returns, the reunion of Imhotep with his former lover, gets surprisingly little to do in the overall plot and feels like a waste though its more somber conclusion on Imhotep's end is at least interesting. Oh, and the new kid character, while nowhere near as aggravating as the worst kid characters in these kind of blockbusters, also isn't all that compelling.

But at least the cast from the first movie is back and still a whole lot of fun and it's particularly neat to see Fraser and Weisz bounce off each other as a married couple while trying to stop mystical mummies while The Mummy Returns itself at least has the good sense to keep itself constantly moving so that even the most poorly done plot points don't stick around for long. There's fun to be had in here, but The Mummy Returns is basically just inoffensive summer fare that overcomplicates things to a detracting degree. The most entertaining part of the whole movie, when all is said and done, may be gazing upon a laughably bad CGI version of Dwayne Johnson as a scorpion monster that shows up in the climax and realizing that the guy they based this creature on would one day become one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. Kinda inspiring, ain't it?