Who's Your Mummy

Guys, I need to make a confession. You know The Mummy movies starring Brendan Fraser? I like them a lot. I think they are fun action adventure movies that are somewhat self aware and don't take themselves too seriously, and whenever they are on TV I watch them, but up until a month ago I'd never seen the third one. So imagine my surprise when I accidentally started watching it on FX one night. I had been watching a re-run of Archer and was slow to change the channel after it ended because I was working on some crafts. So I left it on FX and quickly got sucked into the movie before I even realized it was the Mummy 3. This movie was so great in a bad way that I figured I'd recap it here. So this is your fair warning to stop reading if you don't want spoilers.

The Mummy 3 opens in ancient China with Jet Li playing an evil emperor trying to have it all; a powerful army, control over the elements, and immortality. Just normal evil emperor stuff. In an attempt to get is emperor EGOT, the Emperor sends his bff and head general of his army to find a sorceress who can grant him eternal life. That was a BAD CALL, Emperor, because we all know that the general is going to give the sorceress the business, no duh. The Emperor confirms this by spying on them while they are in bed, but acts like it's all good and tells the Sorceress to go ahead and make him an immortal already. The Sorceress has this old book with all the mystical magic secrets from forever in it, and it's written in Sanskrit, which is a key detail because the emperor doesn't speak Sanskrit. So the Sorceress says the ancient, mystical, Sanskrit spell, and the emperor's immortality senses start tingling. He just knows that he's immortal now. He can totally feel it going through him. IMMORTALITY, FOREVER!

Now that his immortality has been taken care of, it's time to deal with those assholes that were boning under his nose. He takes the Sorceress out to the balcony where she can see her Secret Agent General Man being drawn and quartered, unless she agrees to be his queen. Sorceress is all, you're totally gonna kill us both anyway. Jet Li is all DUH, and then the General is offed while Jet Li and the sorceress struggle and he eventually stabs her in the side. This is where things start to get really weird and gross, 'cause the Emperor starts leaking motor oil or something from his eyes, I guess because he's a robot without empathy software, and then he starts barfing lava in a really crappily done CGI'ed way. (It was at this point I thought wait, is this a Brendan Frasier Mummy movie? Please let it be so!) While this is happening, the Sorceress is crawling away with the Monster Book of Monster Spells and lets the Emperor know HE BURNT, 'cause she didn't give him immorality, she cursed him and his army. Cut to: Emperor's army leaking motor oil and lava barfing. Cut to title card: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. YESSS!

Admit it: this is sitting in your Netflix queue.

The next scene opens with Brendan Frasier having A River Runs Through It moment and failing miserably at fly fishing. After getting the lure stuck in his neck, he whips out his gun and starts shooting at the fish because that's what adventurous, manly men are wont to do. Just ask Ernest Hemingway. Brendan packs up his shrapnel seasoned fish and drives back to his mansion. (Yes, you read that right. And no, I don't get how he could possibly have a mansion, either.) After being told by his butler (mummy killing must be a very lucrative business) that Evie is on the way home, Brendan goes upstairs to finger his old uniforms and fondly remember his past as a real life adventurer and forget that he's a sad old dude with a fishing lure still stuck in his neck. We then drop in on a bookstore (remember those?) where a lovely British lady is reading from her best selling Mummy novel series. But for some reason the camera doesn't show her face...hmm, how odd. She finishes up her reading and customers are asking if there will be a third book and if the female character is really based on her. The camera finally pans to the lady's face, where we see it is not the lovely Rachel Weisz, but the woman that played the sassy bar owner in Coyote Ugly. New Evie says, "why no, I'd say we're completely different people." Very clever, Mummy 3!

Pictured: Not Rachel Weisz

Eventually New Evie makes her way home where her and Brendan have a talk about how they are retired from the mummy and espionage business and oh man isn't that boring, and how they have a college aged son that is up to all sorts of college aged trouble. UH OH. The scene cuts to Brendan and New Evie's son, and ooooh what a bad kid he is. He should be having all of the sex and alcohol and drugs like a good college kid, but instead he is digging up old crap out in the desert. Lame, son. But it turns out that he's digging up the famous Terracotta Army, and he says soon it won't be that he's Rick O'Connell's son, but that Rick is Alex O'Connell's father! (This is called TENSION).  Baby O'Connell and some other random guy go down into the dig to poke around and Baby gets attacked by a random ninja, but seems to think nothing of it. Totally normal, nothing to see here. That's just ninjas. The scene cuts back to Brendan and New Evie who have a visitor telling them all about this giant gemstone called the Eye of Shangri-La that the British government wants them to back to China for some reason. I don't know why; I think I got up to make tater tots at this point. But anyway, they jump at the chance because they are old and boring and retired now, and they've been meaning to see New Evie's brother who conveniently lives in Shanghai.

Next stop, Shanghai! New Evie's brother has opened up a pyramid shaped Hard Rock restaurant in Myrtle Beach popular art deco Egyptian themed nightclub called Imhotep's. You can take the adventurer out of Egypt, but you can't take the Egypt out of the adventurer. Or something.  That's how that saying goes, right?  Anyway, bad seed Alex just so happens to be there and tries to hit on this pretty young lady, but guess what? She's taken! By some guy named Mad Dog who also happens to know Alex O'Connell's father! Just when Mad Dog is about to go 20/20 on his ass, Brendan and Evie show up and they all hug it out. Whew, talk about a close one. I should probably mention that there's another Chinese general who wants to resurrect Jet Li because he has a thing for zombie lava barfers. And the old random guy at the dig is totally in on it. So the happy family is on their way to the opening of the Jet Li and his Merry Band of Terracotta Warriors exhibit, but the Generalissimo and Random Guy are there to take the gemstone and bring Jet Li back to life. YIIIKES. Also in attendance is the random ninja from the tomb, who happens to be a very lovely lady named Lin that Baby O'Connell has apparently previously hit on. Bad boy ladies man, am I right? Because of all the digging in the sand adventure!

A kerfuffle then breaks out and zombie Jet Li is accidentally brought back to life. Guys, this is NOT GOOD. Zombie Jet Li is totes mad, probably due the the fact that he's been a Chia-Pet for centuries. And you can tell he's mad by the fact that his face starts to break off and then bursts into flames to reveal a freshly fired face right out of the kiln. (Get it? Pottery jokes.) So he takes off to find the location of Shangri-La so that he might break the curse and turn himself back into a real boy. The Family O'Connoll follows him into the Himalayas with the help of Mad Dog, who just so happens to own a plane. During the flight they encounter bad weather that causes the plane to be knocked about and thus knocks about everyone inside it. For reasons that aren't explained, one of the passengers happens to be a yak who starts to look very queasy. Evie's brother is ever so kind to hold a barf bag for the yak, but as the plane makes a bumpy landing the contents of the bag dump all over him and the yak. "What's that smell?" Evie 2.0 asks. "The yak got a little airsick" explains the brother. I laughed for a good three minutes at this joke. The yak yaked. Bwahaha. Poor yak. That grass before the plane ride was probably a bad idea, but it happens to the best of us.

After getting the yak some ginger ale and crackers, the gang makes their way to a tower that will reveal the top secret location of Shangri-La. Too bad they are tardy to the tower party, cause Jet Li is already there. But wait! On top of being a ninja, Lin knows how to speak Yeti. She calls out to the Yeti, and it turns out that Yeti aren't imaginary creatures, they are simply endangered ones, as only three show up. Three terribly CGI'ed Yetis against one undead piece of emperor pottery. Those odds seem pretty good, no? NOPE. WRONG. Those odds are not good, because Undead Pottery > 3 Yetis on the magical creatures scale. (Not gonna lie, this and the yak scene were my favorite things about this movie. It's how I knew it was a good one.) After a snowball fight, the emperor escapes with the location of Shangri-La and tries to kill the son of Rick O'Connell, but Rick O'Connell himself steps in and saves his son! And don't worry about the emperor getting to Shangri-La before them, cause Rick O'Connell's son makes an avalanche and somehow this makes it possible for them to get there first this time. Deus ex machina FTW!

Nothing says "good movie" like CGI Yetis.

So remember how Lin was a ninja and spoke Yeti and it was like is there anything she CAN'T do? Well as it turns out there is something she can't do, and that thing is die. You probably didn't see this coming, but her mother is the sorceress from the beginning! Lin and the sorceress live at Shangri-La and have kept Jet Li trapped in his terracotta coffin all these years, and they would've kept it that way if it wasn't for those meddling O'Connells. Eventually Jet Li finds Shangri-La and bathes in this pool of water that gives him the ability to transform into a dragon who then kidnaps Lin and flys off to meet his terracotta army at the Great Wall. Ohhhh, Mummy 3! I hate that your fun must end.

To make a long story short, the Sorceress offers up her and Lin's immortality so she can raise the dead entombed in the wall and use them against the emperor's army. The sorceress is then killed, and Rick and his son O'Connell somehow manage to kill Jet Li with this broken dagger that had been cursed by the Sorceress. Jet Li melts into a puddle of lava vomit and all is right with the world. Hooray! The End.

This blog-cap has been approved by Brendan Fraser.

There you have it, a recap of The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. Would you hold it against me if I went out and bought The Mummy Trilogy? Because I saw it at Target and I totally think it's a good buy. Definitely going to go do that now. Be safe out there, guys and stay away from mummies!