Mummy's Day
"The Mummy Returns full of sound and fury and not much else. Also, vampires lurk in The Forsaken, and that legendary monster Infidelity rears its ugly head in Faithless."
Jeffrey Overstreet
May 1, 2001
It sounds like a little punctuation would give The Mummy Returns a more appropriate title: "The Mummy" Returns. Mainstream and religious media critics alike are groaning at how much this sequel is just The Mummy all over again, only louder, longer, and even more ludicrous. The box office, however, shows that audiences are happily scarfing down the year's first junk food blockbuster without questioning its ingredients or what might be missing. For those who want more information before proceeding, here are the responses of several mummy-gazers.
Christian critic Michael Elliot came out of The Mummy Returns unimpressed. "This is The Mummy slightly repackaged, definitely revisited," the Movie Parables critic writes. "Watching it is a bit like having déjà vu because it sticks pretty close to the original formula." He notes that the film is "high on action and CGI effects but quite low on originality." Similarly, a critic for the U.S. Catholic Conference responds that this "overblown action flick is all non-stop physical confrontations and splashy special effects, with characterizations and narrative lost in all the sound and fury."
Mainstream critics are using adjectives that action movies try to avoid … like boring. FilmCritic.com's Christopher Null shrugs at what he calls "a bunch of cheap fright gags, lame jokes, and boring traps, all of which we've seen countless times before. For much of the film I simply sat there feeling bored." Boredom was the experience of Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert as well: "Imagine yourself on a roller coaster for two hours. After the first 10 minutes, the thrills subside. The mistake of The Mummy Returns is to abandon the characters, and to use the plot only as a clothesline for special effects ...
Related Elsewhere
See earlier Film Forum postings for these other movies in the box-office top ten: Bridget Jones's Diary, Spy Kids, Along Came a Spider, Blow, Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles, Joe Dirt, One Night at McCool's, Memento, and Town and Country.
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