Legacy sequels are a strange beast.

To come out with a sequel years (and sometimes decades) after a previous movie was released can be a real double-edged sword. You can capture nostalgia and tell an interesting story about where the characters have been in the intervening years. But you also have to make sure the tale you are telling is worthwhile and needs to be told. Otherwise, all that you end up with is a soulless cash grab. Ask the Indiana Jones franchise about that. Hell, they’ve done it twice!

So it’s always risky to green light and produce a legacy sequel to popular films. Still, even the bad ones end up making some money due to love for the original property, so we’ll probably keep seeing them in the foreseeable future.

One that we seem to be able to look forward to is another entry in Brendan Fraser’s The Mummy franchise. This has been reported and confirmed, and it seems to be headed to theaters for a date in 2028. Having long-since seen The Mummy (1999), I decided to amp up my excitement for this upcoming entry by marking my first ever watch of The Mummy Returns.

The Mummy Returns was released just two years after The Mummy, but takes place almost a decade later, as Rick and Evie have gotten married and had a child (named Alex) by the time part two starts. This time, they are facing off not only against a revived Imhotep, but also the legend of another corrupted Egyptian warrior, the Scorpion King.

When Alex accidentally puts on the Bracelet Of Anubis, he becomes the key to unlocking an ancient army… an army that Imhotep wants to use to conquer the world. This thrusts Evelyn and Rick back into the fray as they are tasked yet again with stopping the evil of the ancient mummy priest!

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Brendan Fraser is, was, and will always be an Up. His line delivery here is big, bold, and bombastic. He’s not channeling future Academy Award Winner Brendan; he’s summoning all of his cheese factor and delivering dialogue like it’s the most important lines ever given on screen. You’ve got to love his commitment to some very silly screenwriting. 

He just… you FEEL the forcefulness in his voice when he barks an order or delivers a quip or shouts an exclamation. He’s using all of his Acting 101 muscles in this outing, and I love him for it. A lesser actor would never be able to sell some of the dialogue he’s given, but Brendan embraces all of it and just owns it. He is a star among stars.

+ Rachel Weisz’ Evelyn character is given more to do this time around, and she is not reduced to being a damsel in distress nearly as often as she was in the 1999 flick. She has a few fight scenes of her own this entry, and she gets to be much more heroic. Sure, she still needs to be rescued at one point by Jonathan and Alex, but even with that bit included, she still is a lot more empowered than she is at any point in the predecessor. It’s good to see that they grew and went that direction with Evie this time! 

– What this series definitively did not require was a precocious child character/actor messing around and goofing up the proceedings. Not that the 1999 Mummy was a direly serious offering, but because of the Alex character, this one almost feels like a kids’ movie. It’s more juvenile than its forefather at points. Like the humor and characterization were dumbed down to be on a child’s entertainment level. 

I don’t want to besmirch child actor Freddie Boath for his role here because, while his performance was not particularly great, he wasn’t given world-changing material with which to work, either. I’m sure he was doing the absolute best he could out there. But kid performers are so hit-or-miss to begin with.

But the thing is… I kept thinking of Terminator 2, and how a superior director and screenwriter introduced a child character (who also wasn’t exactly knocking on any acting awards’ doors) and made him an indelible part of the proceedings. That’s not what we get here. The Alex character constantly feels like an obstacle the film needs to overcome to get back to what I want to be seeing: pretty much anything else.

– The effects work is a big Down. Whereas the 1999 Mummy had effects work that ranged from terrible to great, almost everything here looks half-cooked. None so much as the Scorpion King final boss, obviously; we have all seen that. Even not having watched this movie before, I had vivid imagery in my head of how that character appeared.

But everything across the board is pretty rough. The pygmy creatures that attack everyone look like cartoons come to unfortunate life. The absorbing of the oasis back into the pyramid is a nightmare of awful CGI. The water attack from Imhotep which is a throwback to his sandstorm attack in the previous movie looks substantially worse than its forefather… it’s just all very bad. They kept trying to do things they clearly didn’t have the skill or technology to handle yet.

OVERALL

The Mummy Returns can bring some joy to the viewer because it returns a likable cast and director to a concept they had knocked out of the park two years before. Some of the magic definitely remains. But the introduction of Alex was a frightfully poorly executed conceit, and the effects are never acceptable. This is a movie that feels like it’s SO CLOSE to being good, but it trips over its own feet on the way there.