BRING ON THE SCORPION KING REBOOT

Empire’s John Nugent on the welcome return of The Rock’s blockbuster

THE SCORPION KING is not a film remembered fondly by history. A 2002 spin-off prequel of easily the worst of the Mummy sequels, it detailed the pre-pyramid years of ancient Egyptian Mathayus (Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson), before the Egyptian god of death, Anubis, condemned him to the underworld. Empire’s two-star review said, “If only the story was as welldeveloped as its leading man’s body.”

So news of a reboot has, perhaps understandably, been greeted with scepticism. But nostalgia is a powerful thing. Like many people of my generation, I have happy memories of loading up the DVD on my Playstation 2 and revelling in the even-then-quite-bad CGI and sword-and-sandals adventuring. To call it a guilty pleasure is to do it a disservice: there’s something about that unabashed late ’90s/early ’00s blockbuster cheesiness that I genuinely miss.

It seems Johnson misses it too. “I wouldn’t have had the career I’m lucky enough to have had it not been for The Scorpion King,” he said on Instagram. And it’s true. It’s easy to forget that at the time, Johnson was better known as a wrestler, and treated as a punchline in Hollywood. Few could have predicted he would soon be the highest-paid actor in the world.

But he’s properly fantastic in The Scorpion King: charisma oozing from all his sweaty, glistening, alpha-male pores. In every scene, he’s magnetic, funny and, importantly, muscly: a truly worthy inheritor of the ’80s crop of outlandish action heroes. Whether he appears in the new film remains to be seen — Johnson is now so in demand that his schedule is locked until 2022 — but I will hungrily welcome whatever his Seven Bucks production company rustles up, ready for repeat viewings on my PS2.