Washing that Mummy out of My Brain

It always annoys when my friends say something like: “I could have told you that,” after I report that some movie really sucked.  No, no you couldn’t have told me that.  Sure, the Mummy III: Tomb of Jet Li Phoning It In looked bad.  There were many warning signs.  But these friends would have said the same thing about Hitman, or Tank Girl, or Blade III: Trinity.  Say what you will, I enjoyed those movies.  I loved all three Resident Evil movies.  I savored the badness (and the cage scene) that was BloodRayne.  Would you deny me those pleasures?  So I take a lot of chances.  Sometimes, as with Babylon A.D., I get about what expect, a flawed movie with derivative elements and some good action.  Even the bad ending didn’t ruin it for me.

But sometimes I get the third Mummy movie.  It’s not so much bad as it is tired.  The almost ritualistic character portrayals using every old trope and stale piece of dialog dragged down the small moments in which the action actually worked.  I love Jet Li, and I like Brendan Frazier.  But neither of them showed up for this movie.  Surrounded by CGI badness, they read through the exhausting dialog with no hope of adding anything fresh to it.  Retired hero misses action.  Father has problems expressing approval of son.  Evil emperor wants to take over world.  (what to good emperors do?)

Fortunately I had already downloaded the unrated version of Hitman on my PS3.  I got home, feeling like I needed to bath in something to get that “Mummy-to-far” feeling out of my system, I started watching this hyper-cool, intense action flick, in which the characters actually seem to care about what they are doing.  Though the reviewers generally have gone negative Hitman, it’s really a lot of fun.