The Mummy 3‘s better than Indiana Jones 4.

Not that this is saying much — I hated Indiana Jones 4. It took an established, beloved American icon and decided that having him give more archaeology lessons while fighting aliens, psychic Soviets and abnormally large fire ants a good movie made.

I bring up Jones‘ now half-good quadrology because that’s exactly the kind of film the 90’s Mummy wanted to be. It starred a ruggedly handsome, wise-cracking manly man fighting against supernatural forces and period-specific military powers, all while trying to get it on with the girl. It was a gamble for a new series of world-tripping adventurers and, against all odds, it worked. It had memorable characters. It had great special effects. And that thing that matters most to action-adventure films: it was fun. I can’t emphasize it enough, because after seeing IJ4, I’m convinced that not everyone knows what “fun” is. Fun is coming up with well-plotted, exciting ideas for every new movie you make. Fun is not hiring someone like George Lucas to plan your story. George, honey, sweetie, I love you, but you have to retire right now before you kill again.

The Mummy 3 starts off well enough. O’Connell and Evelyn are trying to settle down into a normal, boring life post-WW2, when they worked as spies for the British government. Their son has grown up and has run off from college to prove, by becoming an even better explorer, that he is completely different from his father. Oh yeah, and O’Connell just happens to unearth some evil Chinese emperor who was sealed away for x-number of millennia. Cue kung-fu-happy Jet Li as Jet Li as the Dragon Emperor as Jet Li. It’s right up until the actual mummy part that the movie works for me, because the happy swash-buckling couple trying to take up fly-fishing and novel-writing in their 40’s is honest and charming in a way that most action flicks never take the time to develop.

But the Mummy presents a problem because, unlike Imhotep, Li is a pretty boring villain. While Imhotep was also a cold, brooding scoundrel, he had Anck-su-namun, his love interest and raison d’etre for wanting to take over the world. Jet Li just wants to rule the world for the sheer evil bravado of it all. He has no love interest and no reason for wanting power except that he thinks it would be really, really cool to increase the variety of his concubines. Where Imhotep would peel the flesh from your bones just so that you could experience the same pain that he did having his own organs removed and replaced with hungry beetles, Li will just throw some fireballs at you and be on his merry way.

This is the part where there is a sacred order of some kind keeping us silly Americans from unearthing and resurrecting all these poor fools. But in place of Ardeth Bey’s band of holy warriors, we have an immortal witch and her daughter, who have the acting quality of soggy two-by-fours. In fact, the performances get to be so unilaterally bad, and the comedic timing so very, very off, that I don’t really care that O’Connell and company nearly die at every alternate step.

Also, the fun part gets pretty much ruined when there isn’t any to be had, for although the action sequences aren’t as boring as IJ4‘s, one of which put me to sleep for two minutes, they aren’t very inventive either. They’re mainly just flashy and not at all scary, unlike the first two films where, instead of being blown up, you were more likely to be slowly torn apart, limb from limb. Which is way scarier.

Finally, and this seems especially badly timed with the Beijing Olympics and cultural awareness we’re meant to be promoting, the film has almost no Asian-influence in its soundtrack whatsoever and, save two mystical Chinese women, most of the Chinese are evil and the population of China is ultimately saved by ragtag band of Europeans.