Mummy 3

"Mummy 3: The Tomb of the Dragon Emperor," which Jonathan wishes to subtitle "The Sad Abuse of Jet Li," has its moments. Kind of. But chiefly it's an awful little film.

It was doomed to fail because they didn't get Rachel Weisz back to be Evie O'Connell, and she was rockin' awesome. Maria Bello is not rockin' awesome. The script...I'm not sure if even Weisz could have saved it, but Bello certainly didn't. :-( Brendan Fraser and Jet Li were amusing, but they couldn't quite carry it off. It's basically the plots of the earlier Mummy movies with Pirates and the Lord of the Rings soundtrack. (I'm serious: the Evil Emperor gets Orc music. That's how you know he's Evil.)

Basic plot: that great kid Alex is all grown up and boring-ized and is excavating the Emperor's tomb in China and sorta-kinda has a girlfriend who tries to kill him but he doesn't mind, and his parents turn up in China and go all heavy-parent and insult her. But that's okay, because the evil (we aren't sure why, but they say so) Emperor is about to be wakened from the dead, and Alex's girlfriend's mission in life is to keep him from becoming immortal by preventing him from drinking at the Pool of Something-Or-Other in Shangri-La. The O'Connell parents forget they don't like her since there's a much more obvious threat. But the O'Connell parents have mysteriously become boring and suspicious since the last movie, and don't believe the girlfriend when she says the only way to kill the Emperor is by stabbing him through the heart with the special dagger her mother cursed. Naturally, The Worst occurs.

So the yetis hop in and out of the movie in an anime sort of way, and Evie's brother Jonathan is as greedy as ever, and the girlfriend's mother calls up an army of the dead to combat the Emperor's undead terra-cotta army. Why do otherwise rational beings want conquest-happy undead Emperors running round loose? Why do people persist in bringing back the souls of people who died badly and are likely to be very angry? And why, why, why do movies with unimpressive plots have to have dialogue as bad as all that?

Anyway, they eventually get it sorted out, kind of, and all the undead armies conveniently dissolve into dust, and Jonathan determines he's really going somewhere without mummies now. So he picks Peru. The last line of the movie was, "Then mummies were found in Peru..."