From predictable sources such as Indiana Jones all the way to Starship Troopers, Star Wars - The Phantom Menace, and even a scene that looks like it got lost from Steven Spielberg's appalling Peter Pan movie Hook.
THE MUMMY RETURNS MOVIE CAST FULL
It is hardly surprising, now that the studios know that they can sell anything given sufficient hype, that a film called The Scorpion King is in production and slated for release next year.\nAnd speaking of rip-offs, The Mummy Returns is absolutely full of them - so much so that watching it can easily be turned into a game of guess-the-movie. He returns at the end of the film in an animatronic version - straight out of Mortal Kombat - which manages the scowls just as effectively, so that you wonder why they bothered with The Rock at all. This is where Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson - veteran of WWF Smackdown - gets to do his highly publicized US$5 million five-second slot of scowling at the camera.
And on the whole, with the action paced as it is, you don't really have much time to wonder.\nSommers does not believe in wasting any time, and even before the opening credits are quite over, he seems to be halfway through an involved story about the Scorpion King and the lost army of Anubis. To get the rest of the cast from The Mummy involved, a new group of expendable baddies are brought on to resurrect - again - the high priest Imhotep, "who is the only guy tough enough to take on the Scorpion King." Why this death match is desired is never really made very clear, but you are asked to sit back and enjoy the action without worrying too much about the whys and wherefores of the situation. The family, as ever, are on an archaeological dig and discover the bracelet of the Scorpion King, which unbeknownst to them, will release the devastating armies of Anubis. They also have a son (Freddie Boath), who oozes insufferable Home Alone precariousness, but by some miracle manages to avoid being totally nauseating. \nFraser and Weisz are back as the intrepid Rick O'Connell and Evie, who since the first installment, has become his wife. And God forbid if you missed the first installment, for although some effort is made to provide a little background, this is done in such a haphazard fashion as to make almost no impact on our emotional response to the film - if one was ever required. He intends this feature to be bigger, louder and more sumptuous than The Mummy, and he goes about this with terrifying abandon, careless of such niceties as structural or narrative coherence. Stephen Sommers, in going for the sequel, has cast subtlety to the wind. But it is also so crammed with a storyteller's delight and youthful high spirits that it is difficult not to smile indulgently at its antics and admit at the end of it all, perhaps a little shamefacedly, that it really was rather fun. Well, in almost every way, that is exactly what it is. It is easy to knock The Mummy Returns as a despicable piece of cinematic pastiche and a ham-handed attempt to cash in on a good thing.
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