The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor - A Tourist Trap of Epic Proportions
Two thousand years ago, the ageless sorceress Michelle Yeoh transformed the ruthless Emperor Jet Li, who built the Great Wall of China upon the bones of a democratic front, into a clay statue. Everything would have been fine, if not for the British who unearthed the statue.
As a summer blockbuster, the Hollywood “Mummy” is obligated to react not only to the general course of government and party (“democratic opposition to the Qin Empire” – I don’t think Hollywood has ever seen that before), but also to the seasonal movements of wandering masses. In the late 90s and early 2000s, when Russians, recovering from the default, rushed to Hurghada, clutching their first vacation three hundred bucks, the impossibly tenacious corpse of Tutankhamun wandered around our cinemas very conveniently. Now, after the pyramids and an endless romance with Turkey, the Chinese are becoming fashionable, where, according to knowledgeable people, you can cheaply eat seafood, lie on the beach, and visit some museum.
In short, “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” although a shameless clone of “Indiana Jones” of the tourist postmodern era, and made with a marketing calculation for the Olympics with a panda, once 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, a VIP flight over the Himalayan mountains on a biplane, yeti, Shangri-La, wushu “Uncle Li”, traditional medicine “from Auntie Yeoh”, and so on.
From Political Subtext to Tourist Brochure
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 cannot get rid of the clay shell of 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 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 tolerable “Mummy.” Like any smart person who came to the cinema with a Harvard degree, 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.
A Mishmash of Genres and Disappointing Results
What got in the way was the travel agent who had crawled into the cinema, selling clients all the attractions at once. “The Mummy” was cluttered with an inflated international casting and complete schizophrenia of style, when a colonial comedy about black archaeologists is put on a race with Chinese fantasy. Cohen spends about twenty minutes giving 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 James Bond with a Shanghai casino, night chariot races, fireworks and a Kuomintang agent. In the Himalayas, he has Pixar 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, could 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.