Yesterday I had an unexpected surprise when I was called by the lovely people at Universal saying that I had won tickets to see the Mummy 3 The Dragon King; perhaps someone was looking down on me after doing all these Mummy reviews recently. Odeon Leicester Square was the venue and armed with my freebie tickets, I sat down with my son to watch the film on the massive screen.
A new director (Rob Cohen) replaces Stephen Sommers at the helm and he teams the O’Connells up with their now older son Alex who finds the tomb of the Dragon King (Jet Li) in China, he of course gets brought to life, they have to hunt him and kill him or he will take over the world…hmmm so nothing new on the story line then.
It wasn’t a bad film and I did enjoy it, although that may have been because it was free, but there were some points that for me make this the weakest of the three films in the franchise. The main point being that Rachel Weisz did not return to play Evelyn, and whilst Maria Bello is a good actress, Eve O’Connell she isn’t and although this may only be an issue for people who have seen the other two films it was, for me, obvious that Rachel Weisz just seemed so much more suited to the role in terms of her Englishness and style.
Secondly John Hannah, hmmm well his quips were funny in the Mummy, and they were mostly funny in Mummy Returns, but sadly in Dragon King they seemed lame and he was not as effective as in the previous two movies.
Lastly, and this may be just me getting old, but Rob Cohen just seems to have tried to get bigger explosion after bigger explosion rather than on the finer details of storytelling and for me it seemed to spoil the movie slightly. As well as the issues above there were a few continuity issues where you think “hey, but this happened earlier, so how can that happen now” these periods tell of sloppy screenwriting to me. Can you spot the bits I mean? (Assuming you see the film of course).
This is not to say that everything is bad though, there are many good bits in the film too. There are some creatures on the side of good that look fantastic, I don’t want to reveal too much about those but they do look awesome. Also the battle at the end between the Dragon Kings army and the forces of good is impressive the cgi looks awesome and you are impressed by what you are seeing on screen.
Overall I do think it worthy of a watch, it moves at a fast pace and despite the bad points that I mentioned about it looks quite impressive, but you may want to wait for the DVD release.