The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

I'm not going to pretend I didn't like the first two Mummy movies. They were dumb in places, but had some all right humor and undead-destroying action, with the first being a pretty competent tribute to those old movie serials as far as I know. The third film is just too little too late, though. The writer/director of the first two is gone, moved on to the uh... greener pastures of G.I. Joe. Rachel Weisz is gone, replaced by Maria Bello, who's not bad, but not as good. The classic Egyptian theme is gone, replaced with a Chinese setting instead, which isn't a terrible idea but doesn't get executed perfectly. It's cool that Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh are in it, but in the end they don't do much. They have a couple brief scenes showing of their talents, but Yeoh is gone for most of the film and Li is replaced by an incomplete, Computer-enhanced version with magic elemental powers. Because he's Asian, you see.

There's some not-that-funny jokes and not-that-exciting effect-laden action sequences as both sides race to Shangri-La, where a magic artifact will blah blah blah. There's some crappy looking yetis, some clumsy romance developed between the O'Connell's annoying son who hasn't improved with age and a change in actor and a 2,000 year old teenage ninja, and a big final epic battle where two mummified armies clash to little consequence. I feel like I'm being harsh on the movie, because it wasn't actively boring or hate-worthy. It just rarely if ever succeeds at what the first two films did right, and I just don't like the shift in setting. If the second movie was somewhere else, maybe Arabian or something, then it would be fine for each one to have a different villain and be a globe-hopping Mummy-killing franchise. But it was a direct sequel, with the exact same bad guy, and the new setting and villain along with it coming out seven years later just makes it feel like the black sheep of the series, which it ultimately is.

Tomorrow Never Dies

Much like Live and Let Die was the Bond blaxploitation movie, Tomorrow Never Dies could easily be called James Bond: Hong Kong Action Edition. It takes place largely in Vietnam, was actually filmed in Taiwan, features Hong Kong's biggest female action star as the first Asian Bond girl since You Only Live Twice (I think), and takes a lot of cues from that style of film. Thankfully there's no scenes with Bond doing kung fu, but Michelle Yeoh has a full-on fight with a bunch of dudes in an old, dusty shack that she afterward transforms into a high-tech command outpost with the push of a button. The last sequence where they raid a stealth boat trying to incite war between Great Britain and China so Johnathan Pryce can control the media there (cool plan, bro) is filled with lots of machine gun fire, explosions, people bloodlessly collapsing to the ground and a couple more gruesome ends.

But before that, there's a lot of traditional Bond movie stuff. I like how the early throwaway girl is already in his bed when we first see him, it's just like the filmmakers are saying "This series is 35 years old, you know what's up." It's a brief film for the Brosnan era, not reaching two hours, and some segments feel rushed, like when the entire briefing from M and Moneypenny takes place while in a car headed to the airport. Bond does some stuff at a party Pryce is hosting, including romancing a married woman for the first time in the series (though they have a previous history) and beating up some thugs who try to question him. After a sequence featuring an unusual hit man in one of the franchise's only instances of being funny for an extended period without being silly, followed by a remote controlled car chase that is totally silly, Bond moves on to 'Nam where we finally get to the stuff I was talking about earlier. Did I mention the tag-team moves using handcuffs, the stunt going down the side of a skyscraper, or the motorcycle chase through crowded streets involving jumps and helicopters? Because they happen. Tomorrow Never Dies is far from the most intelligent Bond movie, but it mostly makes up for it with generally competent action.

James Bond stats
Theme song: "Tomorrow Never Dies" by Sheryl Crow
Foreign locations: Russia, Hamburg, Vietnam
Bond, James Bond: 31:25
Martini shaken, not stirred: 33:00
Ladies seduced: 3
Chases: 2
Kills: 25, plus explosion victims
Non-lethal takedowns: 19