Seeing as I spent the day with Paul yesterday, and he wanted to see it, we went to The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor. Not the type of thing I'd ordinarily spring for, but it made for a surprisingly fun cinematic house of mirrors.
Yes, this latest entry in The Mummy franchise is, like its predecessors, a rather obvious Indiana Jones knock-off. But why stop there? There are shameless cribs from everything from Zhang Yimou's Hero to Sam Raimi's Army Of Darkness to Ishiro Honda's Ghidorah The Three-Headed Monster to that ultra-cool Yeti episode of Jonny Quest.
Mostly, though, the movie attempts to evoke some of the spirit of Ray Harryhausen's monster matinee classics (there are sword-wielding skeletons, for God's sake), and while it doesn't succeed--the clunky CGI is no match for Harryhausen's beautifully hand-crafted stop-motion animation--watching it, I realized the new film's director, Rob Cohen, is the big-budget equivalent of Gordon Hessler.
Hessler directed Harryhausen's The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad, and while that movie, like most Harryhausen pictures, basically consisted of killing time in between monster attacks, it was notably dreary in its expository scenes. Hessler's clumsy stylistic tics--handheld camera, lazy zooms--were all wrong for an Arabian Nights fantasy, and he'd let sequences heavy with dialogue run on and on, even as he lost track of the story. Prior to Golden Voyage, Hessler had made some enjoyably lurid horror entries for Amicus and AIP (Scream And Scream Again is particularly good), but he mostly didn't even rise to the level of competent craftsman--much of his work is genuinely poor, and he finally made the move to episodic TV, where directors serve mostly as traffic cops, getting the work done in an already-set house style.
And yet, when I was ten years old, I was not sitting in the theater critiquing the choice of lenses in The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad. I patiently awaited the next monster, and was rewarded every time. Sure, I knew this wasn't as good as The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad or Jason And The Argonauts (for one thing, no sword-wielding skeletons!), but I enjoyed it.
So it is with The Mummy: Tomb Of The Dragon Emperor. Paul, who is eight (nine as of this coming Saturday), couldn't have cared less about Rob Cohen's maladroit staging of sight gags, or that his notion of directing scenes with lots of dialogue apparently consists of turning on the cameras and hoping for the best, or that his action sequences have no sense of drive or rhythm. Sure, he probably knew this wasn't as good as many, many other movies he's seen, but as he said to me halfway through, "This has a lot of fight scenes."
And sometimes, in the waning days of summer, when you just want to shut your mind off and relax, that's enough.
