The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (12A)

Help! Somebody has stolen the mummy. And the plot ...

(UNIVERSAL STUDIOS)

The 1999 fun adventure yarn, The Mummy, and its terrible 2001 sequel, The Mummy Returns, were inspired – to put it delicately – by Indiana Jones, so it was a curious move of the producers to bring their franchise back from the grave at the very moment when Harrison Ford and co decided to do the same. But that's not their only curious move. They've lumbered the Indy-alike hero (Brendan Fraser) with a grown-up son (Luke Ford), just like Indy's, but the two actors look as if they're brothers. Rachel Weisz, the co-star of the first two films, has been replaced by Maria Bello, but her English accent is even worse than the one used by John Hannah, and that's saying something. Worst of all, it's a film entitled The Mummy which doesn't even have a mummy in it.

The setting has moved from Egypt to China. In a long, long prologue, we're informed that in ancient times an emperor (Jet Li) forced a witch (Michelle Yeoh) to grant him immortality, but she got her revenge by turning him and his army into terracotta warriors. A couple of millennia later, in 1946, Fraser and family are hoodwinked into helping a Chinese general to revive the emperor using a magic crystal. That's the sensible, coherent part of the plot. From then on, this witless nonsense gets more and more garbled. It's not often that a film is so blatant about seeing the story as a small detail to squeeze in between all the explosions, avalanches and computer-generated monsters.