With The Mummy - Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, the movie has now become a commercial one with comical flavour without any reference to its past episodes like a Bond movie, you can say. With this, Mummy joins series like James Bond, Rush Hour and the MI.
While the brilliant graphics still make you applaud in the theatres, you would definitely miss the Egyptian flavour since Mummy has now headed to China. No one can deny the great background score with Egyptian feel that the first two parts carried and that is now replaced with more of jazz and the like. To me, this only denotes the way Americans start off researching diligently with the roots of other cultures and gradually move(or rather get carried away) towards their own.
Another great thing that you would miss is Rachel Weisz who has been replaced with Maria Bello to play Evelyn Carnahan-O’Connell: Rick’s wife. Brendan Fraser though looks a little old is more handsome probably because you see him quite often alongside Maria Bello. Maria looks like an old witch and for the first 5 minutes you don’t even think she’s paired with Brendan.
Story is pretty simple with predictable screenplay if you are used to the formula from the first two parts. A bedtime story-like flashback where an Emperor(played by Jet Li) and his army are cursed, resurrected in 1946 during Brendan’s time(this guy has now become of historical importance more than the mummies), Brendan goes with his wife like on a honeymoon trip to China, finds Alex, his son who actually resurrected the mummy(would’ve been good if he had rather killed his original mummy, Maria) and they together plan to kill the great dragon emperor. The kill is also a formula you are used to – a special knife to be pierced through the Emperor’s chest. They have so religiously followed the formula that it is Brendan’s turn to be killed in this part and later resurrected by a holy water.
Beyond this, I will have to just pick words to talk about the movie though it’s worth watching once in the theatre if let’s say you had nothing else to do.