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Review of the film "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor"

Sun Jun 08 2025

Two thousand years ago, the ageless witch Michelle Yeoh turned the ruthless Emperor Jet Li, who built the Great Wall of China on the bones of the democratic front, into a clay statue. Everything would have been fine if not for the British who dug up the statue.

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Hollywood’s “Mummy,” as befits a summer blockbuster, must respond not only to the general course of the government and the party (“democratic opposition to the Qin Empire” - it seems that Hollywood has not seen this before), but also to the seasonal movements of idle masses. In the late 90s and early 2000s, when the Russian, recovering from the default, rushed to Hurghada, clutching his first vacation three hundred bucks in his fist, the impenetrably tenacious corpse of Tutankhamun wandered around our cinemas very opportunely. Now, after the pyramids and an endless romance with Turkey, the Chinese are coming into fashion, where, according to knowledgeable people, you can cheaply eat seafood, lie on the beach, and visit some museum.

In general, “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” although a shameless clone of “Indiana Jones” of the era of tourist postmodernism, albeit made with a marketing calculation for the Olympics with a panda, again answers the eternal Russian question “where to relax?” All the sights of the film are conveniently converted into a price list of a travel agency around the corner: shopping in Shanghai, the Great Wall, the museum of terracotta dummies, VIP flight over the Himalayan mountains on a biplane, yeti, Shangri-La, wushu “Uncle Li”, traditional medicine “from Aunt Yeoh”, and so on.

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Political Undertones and Shifting Sands

Ten years ago, the white man’s struggle with the Asian corpse was an irresponsible, funny, and without any particular political undertones. Now, this service is accompanied by complex bows before the host of the Olympic Games. Thus, Emperor Jet Li throughout the film can not get rid of the clay shell of the eastern dictatorship and looks like an almost tragic figure. Democratic zombies, risen from under the Great Wall under the influence of Chinese folk medicine, for which Michelle Yeoh is responsible in the film, want to help him with this. But the emperor turned out to be an inflexible man, not amenable to democracy - clay, you know, cursed Asian clay!

Director’s Dilemma and Creative Compromises

Director Stephen Sommers - the inventor and soul of the franchise - realized the bows in time and distanced himself from the project. It seemed that Rob Cohen, who showed himself well on “XXX,” should have made a decent “Mummy.” Like any smart person who came to the cinema with a Harvard diploma, he perfectly understood that he would have to shoot idiocy, and relax - on special effects and English humor. With special effects and humor, however, the Chinese “Mummy” coped very mediocrely.

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Overstuffed and Underwhelming

The tour agent who crawled into the cinema, selling all the attractions to the clientele at once, got in the way. “The Mummy” was cluttered with an inflated international casting and complete schizophrenia of style, when a colonial comedy about black archaeologists is put to race with Chinese fantasy. For twenty minutes, Cohen gives out Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, depicting the Qin Empire. The next twenty switches to the British Empire, trying to joke in the Victorian style (“you have a fishing hook stuck in your neck, sir”). In China, he builds Jace Bond with a Shanghai casino, night chariot races, fireworks and a Kuomintang agent. In the Himalayas, he has Pixar’s yeti living, zombies are digging under the Great Wall. No one would be surprised if he drove toothy creatures, vampires and Aliens into “The Mummy.” Sommers, maybe, would have coped with such a crowd, but Cohen did not have enough drive or artistry for this, and all this looks more like not even a symbiosis of genres, but another hysterical outburst of Hollywood cuisine, where they no longer know what else can surprise the gluttonous viewer and stuff a watermelon with pork cartilage.

As a result, the third “Mummy” is the very case when you need and can do the impossible: do not go on vacation anywhere, spit on the Himalayas and go see the mummy of Ilyich. And then, say, on Russian birches. And get great pleasure from it.