I’m just home from a night out in the West End with my brother, N who’s recently moved to London. We had lunch on Wednesday, and decided that a trip to Leicester Square to see the new (and third) movie in The Mummy franchise – The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.
Anyway, it was great to catch up with my brother and we tried to help the movie along a bit by stopping off at Covent Garden for a drink beforehand. But even so, although the movie tried really hard, it just didn’t manage to cut it. It just felt like the script was trying very hard do an awful lot of scene-setting in a very short period of time and from then on the dialogue always played second fiddle to the action and CGI sequences. Not that there’s anything wrong with that … as long as the movie is Transformers or an Arnold Schwarzenegger action-fest.
(BTW – there’s a new Transformers movie ‘Revenge of the Fallen’ in production; you couldn’t see that one coming!)
All up, I think the Tomb of the Dragon Emperor would have been a whole lot better if the Hollywood production monster had been kept well away from the project. It seemed like the production and editing philosophy was ‘the bigger the bang, and the more expensive the sequence, the better it is!’. It’s just a shame that’s only true of NYE fireworks displays.
Sydney harbour NYE fireworks
The plot-line of the movie wasn’t terrible, although there were more than just a few familiar plot devices than appeared through the film. It was just trying far too hard – like there should have been at least one, perhaps two installments in between The Mummy Returns and Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, but time and budget didn’t permit.
{basic plot synopsis – 1946; son now grown up and supposed to be in college but has dropped out and is in China on the dig to discover the Terracotta Warriors, but parents don’t know; parents have ‘retired’ from the tomb raiding / espionage business and are bored stiff being genteel English country folk; parents are enticed to ‘courier’ an artifact to China, meet up with the son and the fun begins}
The verdict – a fun, but mildly disappointing way to spend 2hrs of your life. Wait ’til it’s on DVD or TV.
Filed under: London, Movie, Random | Tagged: fireworks, Movie review, New Years, Sydney Harbour, The Mummy, Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
