The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Certainly effective, but more like an overpriced video game. If it weren’t for the solid cast and outstanding ending, it would have been a tragedy. Jet Li is criminally underused and I bet that he managed to film his part in three days max, but luckily he makes a good villain and so he manages to impress despite everything. And when I think back to the trailers, it looked so promising. Oh dear. (11/08/2008)

This is easy to predict and even easier to forget crap which at times is not even good enough for that one single use. Cohen is a purely action director, so it all comes down to overblown acrobatic escapades, which are ably followed by special effects, but their sterility knows no bounds. It lacks any ounce of perspective (and no, Liam Cunningham doesn't save it), and thus you're more likely to identify scenes stolen from elsewhere. I don't mind Maria Bello (I like her a lot as an actress), but as a replacement for Rachel Weisz, she was a total casting mistake. The family etudes are tired and the whole is desperately boring. (11/05/2010)

Yuck. I love The Mummy, and The Mummy Returns is a great sequel. But this? Rob Cohen is not Stephen Sommers. Maria Bello is not Rachel Weisz. Jet Li is not Arnold Vosloo. Neither Brendan Fraser nor John Hannah do much in favor of the third Mummy. I liked a few, really only a few, scenes (the opening one, the yetis and part of the final "battle") but overall I was very disappointed. Thanks at least for the likeable duo of Michelle Yeoh and Isabella Leong. Thanks to Cohen, all the playfulness has gone out of The Mummy, leaving an uninspired 112-minute-long mess, which I hope has been so overused that no one will make a fourth film. Only Sommers, but I don't believe that.__P.S. Edelman's good music is a shame to waste on this one. (08/29/2009)

Unnecessarily long introduction, where the legend is revealed, around which it will revolve, is just a plagiarism of the first part and quite sufficiently shows how the rest of the movie will proceed. Boring and unnecessarily long. The film is visually quite interesting at times, but what's the point when the story is really not worth anything? This is not a nice return to old familiar characters. Furthermore, I really missed Rachel Weisz here. I mean, no offense to Maria Bello, but Rachel is my favorite. Well, simply an incredible copycat of previous parts, only now it's Asian... (04/01/2014)

I really wasn’t asking too much from “I’ve even got a long way to go to become a routineer". All I wanted was a disposable harmless summer nonsense movie. But Cohen couldn’t even manage that. Instead, through his approach of “sort of humor, sort of screenplay, sort of blockbuster" he spreads an epidemic. The signs start to show somewhere around the tenth minute. First just in a few individuals. Then it spread quickly to the rest of the audience. Not even kids are immune. The first sign is massive yawning, the second nodding, the third is sleeping on the escalator when leaving the movie theater and the fourth is a disservice to Hollywood. After this, nobody can be surprised that so many people are allergic to it. I believe that if they organized a mass simultaneous projection of this movie around the planet, it would get into the Guinness Book of Records. For the largest number of people sleeping at one moment. There’s only one cure for this. Indy treatment. (08/02/2008)