The woeful US-China co-production that buried a popular franchise
Despite the success of The Mummy (1999) and The Mummy Returns (2001), when it came to the belated second sequel, things did not look good.
For the 2008 film The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,
director Stephen Sommers handed over the reins to Rob Cohen (xXx); Rachel Weisz declined the offer to return; and Brendan Fraser was in terrible physical shape after years of impromptu stunt work.
“By the time I did the third Mummy picture in China, I was put together with tape and ice,” he told GQ.
What it did have, however, was a lucrative co-production deal with China. To make the most of this investment, Jet Li Lianjie and Michelle Yeoh would co-star; major sequences would be set and shot in China; and the plot would serve up a cartoonified version of Chinese mythology.
If that meant getting drafts of the screenplay signed off by the Chinese paymasters, so be it.
“We had to depoliticise the script to keep certain things as fantasy and not so historical,” Cohen complained to Variety, as if unaware that the audience was expecting The Last Crusade rather than The Last Emperor.
Before the film begins, you can see the baton being passed from West to East. Underneath the Universal logo is a globe showing the Americas and Europe. The difference this time is that it spins round to Asia and on China, where the prologue takes place.
This details how, after building the Great Wall of China, the Dragon Emperor (Li) and his armies were turned into terracotta warriors by sorcerer Zi Yuan (Yeoh).
The film then fast-forwards to 1946, where our heroes, Rick (Fraser) and Evelyn O’Connell (now played by Maria Bello), are getting bored of their humdrum married life in England. Rick has taken to shooting fish with a revolver. English rose Evelyn writes adventure novels.
“Honestly, I can say I’m a completely different person,” she says at one of her book readings, archly acknowledging the fact she’s not Rachel Weisz – or English.
Meanwhile, in China, their intrepid son Alex (Luke Ford, who is only 13 years Fraser’s junior) has stumbled upon the tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Needless to say, the emperor doesn’t stay dead for long.
As a location, China provides plenty of bang for the studio’s buck, offering up the pyramids of Ningxia, and a Tian Mo Ming dynasty village, among other impressive sites.
Though set in downtown Shanghai, the best sequence – a frenetic, firework-filled Lunar New Year chase through the city – was actually shot in Shanghai Studios.
“Don’t you just love this country? They have so many extra little holidays and drinking is mandatory!” exclaims returning series regular Jonathan Carnahan (John Hannah).
Rick, meanwhile, just hurls money at passers-by, not a bad summary of Hollywood foreign policy.
Elsewhere, however, the film does its co-production status no favours. For most of the runtime, Jet Li’s character is brought to life with terrible CGI. This means we barely see the actor, despite the fact he has second billing on the poster.
The other Chinese characters are woefully one-dimensional: an evil general (Anthony Wong Chau-sang), an inscrutable assassin (Isabella Leong Lok-sze) and an ancient mystic (Yeoh).
No matter what language you’re speaking, the dialogue is terrible.
“I’m not here for five minutes and I’m already pulling your fanny out the fire!” Rick chides Alex. He might want to try asking his wife what that sentence means in British English.
But if you’re looking for the exact moment the film “jumps the shark”, it’s in the Himalayas sequence, which is clearly shot on a soundstage, when Wong punches a CGI yeti in the face. Truly, there’s no way back from that.
Besides being a critical failure around the world, the film performed disappointingly at the Chinese box office, grossing less than Kung Fu Panda and The Forbidden Kingdom, which featured rather more Jet Li.
In response to such a poor showing, a mooted sequel set in Peru was dropped, and Universal rebooted the franchise with 2017’s The Mummy, which also tanked. Talk about the Mummy’s curse.