I really enjoyed the second part of the Mummy, The Mummy Returns, at the moment 
Well, I didn' even found it enjoyably bad, just plain bad. Maybe it's because I haven't watched it in 2001, but rather just a month ago, when I watched the whole trilogy for the first time.
Which is a rather shame, because I like most of those actors very much - Brendan Fraser is always a joy to watch, Oded Fehr is a very cool actor, Arnold Vosloo is excellent as a villain, Rachel Weisz is wonderful, and (even if I hate American wrestling) I simply love Dwayne ''The Rock'' Johnson. He is not a good serious actor, but man, he is so fun to watch in almost every film, because he doesn't take himself so seriously as other wrestlers-turned-actors.
And I like quasi-archaeology/adventure/fantasy genre.
So what went wrong, then?
I think that several factors determined that, but most notably - the inclusion of a kid character as one of the main protagonists... Oh, God... Haven't the filmmakers learned anything from Star Wars - Phantom Menace? Nobody wants to see a kid as a main character. I don't mean a regular kid, but a kid that acts like the boy in Mummy Returns. He doesn't act as an 8 year old boy - he almost shows no fear, he is more resourceful than Bear Grylls, he speaks ancient Egyptian, his dialogue is amazingly bad, and the kid-actor that plays the part is baaaad. I know it is hard to direct children in the films, but man, he was bad.
We have a cituation when
and he is emotionless. He doesn't show sorrow, or pain, or anger.
After a while, he starts to cry a bit, but when he gets an idea, he simply stops crying and starts to talk normally and to lay out his plan. The film was obviously more family-friendly, but not in the good way, and even the jokes and the dialogs were worse than in the first Mummy.
If I knew that I should completely turn off my brain while watching it, then maybe it would have been a lot better, but alas, I didn't. But aside from the big problem (the super-kid as a main character) I also had some nitpicky things, but also major plotholes that bugged me:
- Why does Jonathan continues to drive a bus frantically if all mummy-guards are already inside? Wouldn't it have more sense to stop the bus and deal with them more easily?
- They tell us that you can only kill a warrior of Anubis if you cut off his head. However, we clearly see them dying several times when impaled by the Medjai swords in their torsos.
- Rick actually running from sunlight... Sunlight doesn't work that way.
- Instead of applying the real face of Dwayne Johnson on the Scorpion King, they did a bad CGI of his face. I know it was 2001, and that CGI wasn't that strong yet, but don't do a max closeup of his CGI face then.
- How was CGI was worse than in the first Mummy (I'm looking at you, crappy scarabs)
- The sub-plot with Evie (R. Weisz) being an reincarnation of Nefretiri... Completely pointless, lke Evie wasn't a good character already, we have to see her fight now (and why didn't Imhotep recognised her in the first film, when he clearly knew her before, as we saw in the flashback).
- The kid stopping the train with the handbrake, exactly on the location where they were going. If so, why didn't the train ''driver'' already stopped the train regulary?
- In the final battle, we see that Medjai have thousands of members. Why didn't they protect Hamunaptra in the first place (in the first film), if there are so many of them?
- In the final battle,, we can't see any dead bodies of fallen Medjai.
- I don't remember anymore, but I know that there was more.
Funny thing, it's one of the few films where I found myself
literally fecapalming myself.
I did it with the new Conan the Barbarian film.
Anyway, perhaps I'm too nitpicky, but I really wanted to like Mummy 2, but I didn't at all.
