31 July 2008

Can't get a good remake these days

From a review in the Chicago Tribune:
"The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is bleh, though it's likely to click with the public, given the enormous profitability of the first two in the recent Mummy cycle. Certainly Brendan Fraser's granite-jawed, goofily satiric take on a generic serial archetype, the tomb-raiding wiseacre, didn't hurt. Nor did Rachel Weisz simply showing up and being there, pulling laughs out of thin air and reminding everybody else that there's a trick to acting even in a soulless evocation of another era. It's called style. For this third installment in the series, Weisz took a powder, leaving a role open for the similarly overqualified Maria Bello. Tomb of the Dragon Emperor begins promisingly, with a pleasantly outsize prologue setting up the stuff about the ancient horrible warlord ( Jet Li) turned to stone by a 2,000-year-old curse. Michelle Yeoh plays the good witch who re-enters the story in 1946, aiding Fraser and Bello and their grown adventurer son. Also we get a trio of abominable snowfolk, and the skeletal ghosts of the emperor's long-buried slaves, revived to fight the emperor's stone-no-more army... The film has one objective: to smack its audience in the face with fleeting, competing wows, over and over. Characters both digitized and human are constantly getting kicked in the head, or beheaded. The bone-crunching sound effects are cranked up to the glory-day levels of Sensurround. Except it's Sensurround without a breather."

Rico says he was hoping for better from this one; without Rachel Weisz, there's no point in going anyway...

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