The mummy of the treacherous priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) returns to 1933 from the third millennium BC, when he was mummified alive for treason, and from the mid-20s, when in the first part the resurrected Imhotep was temporarily subdued by the hero Brendan Fraser. Since then, Fraser has married Rachel Weisz, but continues to frolic around the Egyptian pyramids, as his wife still has nightmares. However, there were villains who do not care about family values, they want power over the world and the absolutization of evil. They remembered that long before Imhotep, in the fifth millennium BC, a certain Scorpion King sold his soul to Anubis. And now, together with the unsinkable mummy, they are aiming for the mysterious Am Sher, where the King’s pyramid stands and where the dog-headed countless hordes of Anubis can be re-embodied and lured to their side. But, by unfortunate coincidence, only Fraser’s son (Freddie Boath) can find the way to Am Sher, a sensible child who cannot be deceived. Then the villains kidnap him from his native foggy London and take him back to hot, creepy Egypt.
However, this is already the middle of the movie, from the beginning of which a lot has already happened. The film is not recommended for adherents of creeping realism. Its charm lies precisely in the increasing dense and continuous delirium. It doesn’t matter where something comes from, it is more important that the adventures with transformations take such a quantity per minute that you won’t even have time to smoke. For this, Stephen Sommers involved in the plot not only all the silent “Sheiks” and “Indian Tombs” seen in childhood, not only the old sound “Mummy” with Boris Karloff, along with his own previous one, but also the current best scenes from “Titanic”, “Gladiator”, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”. The waters of the Nile gush into the dungeon, half-naked women fight with swords, the flanks of prehistoric armies converge among the dunes.
Actors and Special Effects
Stephen Sommers mixed it up thickly, I must say. Therefore, there is little text, and it would be a sin not to imbue with irony the one that still sounds. “How tired I am of mummies,” says Brendan Fraser, smashing another mixture of dust and mucus chasing after the bus. All the actors, including the champion in no-holds-barred fights, The Rock (Scorpion King), and the highly intelligent Englishman John Hannah (Jonathan), happily played along with the director’s tall tales, because they know that everything is fair: we run, we don’t touch anyone, we fix the primus stove. If anyone wants to, they break away together. The absence of consequences is guaranteed.
But no inventions could condense the plot to laughter without new generation special effects. And, therefore, from the very beginning, hordes of cockroaches emerge from the quicksand of the disturbed excavation, crawl under the skin of the prospectors, scurry under it, making their way higher and higher, and splash out of their mouths. And in the middle of the film, a face peels off one and is put on another. And in the finale, the Am Sher oasis neatly collapses into nothing. Nevertheless, even the high-class of the famous “Industrial Light & Magic” sometimes cannot keep up with Sommers’ flight of fantasy. Black whirlwinds are quite monotonous, and when the hordes of dog-headed ones dispersed, it would not hurt to leave a trace of black dust on the faces of the Bedouins. But in case of shortage, humor works again. If the new generation of special effects also does not pull on the fact that dust and mucus, catching up with the bus in London, runs along the steep walls with human grace, it runs deliberately, as in a cartoon, parodying the very fact of using special effects.
Conclusion
In general, there are apparently few adherents of creeping realism left in the world, thanks to the light hand of newly arrived Hollywood pranksters like Sommers (“The Jungle Book”). During the premiere weekend, “The Mummy Returns” grossed 70 million convertible currency in America.