The Mummy, a Fish and a Bicycle: True Love Is Always an Adventure
by J. Richard Pearcey

When The Mummy Returns debuted during the May 4 weekend, Americans unloaded a record-breaking $70.1 million to see this thriller on the Nile outpace Sylvester Stallone's Driven, which crossed the finish line in second place at a distant $6.05 million.

This is the largest-ever box office opening for a debut during a non-holiday weekend. And for the overall list of box office debuts (holiday and non-holiday), it fell only slightly behind the $72-million breakout of The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Memorial Day weekend, May 1997).

What's all the fuss about? The Mummy Returns begins in 1935, a good ten years after the heroics depicted in the also-very-successful 1999 film The Mummy. The main players of the original cast are all back, but now swashbuckling legionnaire Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) has married librarian/ Egyptologist Evelyn (Rachel Weisz), and they are raising their nine-year-old son, Alex (introducing Freddie Boath), in London.

Arnold Vosloo returns as the re-enfleshed mummy Imhotep, who is still searching for love and immortality with Anck-Su-Nahum (Patricia Velasquez). Another new guy in the movie is a veteran of the World Wrestling Federation, The Rock, who plays the Scorpion King, an ancient warrior who sold his soul to the god Anubis in return for victory in battle.

All of which contributes to a story line in which Rick and Evelyn must save both their son and the world from the Mummy and his conniving, murderous girlfriend, and from the seemingly invincible Scorpion King, who has no love of Imhotep and who with his army of canine-like warriors of the sand is ready to destroy all who would oppose his power.

The number and magnitude of the special effects in The Mummy Returns are staggering, but not truly overwhelming, as some reviewers have suggested. The film offers creepy black beetles (crawling outside and inside the skin!), water crashing between towering canyon walls, pigmy mummies that wreak havoc on humans in jungles, hordes of sand warriors in the army of Anubis, terrific flashback scenes of ancient Egypt, people writhing in Hell, people outracing the rising sun, a magic bracelet, a pyramid with one heck of a vacuum cleaner, the Scorpion King as both man and big, bad bug, and the Mummy himself, who can do everything but find true love.

Which brings us to perhaps the most amazing thing of all about this movie: It features an intact loving family together on the adventure of a lifetime.

How the censors in Hollywood let this through, I don't know, but Rick and Evelyn have stayed married beyond the infamous seven-year itch (that's seven months in Hollywood-time) and are still very interested in each other-on several levels-and are always ready with a quip, a knowing look, an embrace. And they've passed on many a good trait to Alex, a chip off the old pyramid who reads hieroglyphics (taught him by his mom-another victory for home schooling?).

Young Alex is as much a klutz as Evelyn (see her antics in the first movie) and could be a sculptor in his day job (he shapes magnificent, detailed "sandcastles" of Egyptian locales that help his parents find him after he's kidnapped), and displays throughout a comical impertinence needed to survive supernatural born killers, or to drive an intimidating kidnapper nuts while on a train by repeating that question universally asked by children on trips: "Are we there yet?" (We could have done without his, "My dad's going to kick you’re a--," however. Not that some adults don't deserve a kick in the pants. The film is rated PG-13, for its intense adventure action and for violence. It is probably too scary for youngsters, say, 10 or 11 and under. In disbelief I saw a young man bring into the theater two children who looked all of three or four.)

The film contrasts the healthy marriage of Rick and Evelyn with the passionate but destructive relationship of Imhotep and Anck-Su-Hamun. They too want love and fulfillment, but their choices preclude them from experiencing the richness of love and communication the O'Connells enjoy. That this relationship was misguided from the start is evident in that it impelled Imhotep and Anck-Su-Hamun to murder Pharaoh, which then led to Imhotep's torture and cursed death and mummification and to his accomplice's suicide (she was to be called forth millennia later by the power of the resurrected Mummy).

But as a moment in the film shows, their relationship fails because Anck-Su-Hamun could never escape the real deity in her life: herself, her feelings, her choices. One might say that, in the final analysis, she needed Imhotep like a fish needs a bicycle.

Two Hours of Darkness
by Bob Smithouser

What promises to be a sequel-driven summer began with a $70 million opening weekend for The Mummy Returns (PG-13). Equally violent and more spiritually bankrupt than the original, this installment finds trigger-happy adventurer Rick O'Connell (Fraser) and darling Evelyn (Weisz) married with an 8-year-old son. The year is 1933.

The plot? Bad guys want to wake the dead and bring unspeakable evil into the world (today they'd just release a Marilyn Manson CD). Can these devils be stopped?

The O'Connells' first order of business is to find their son, kidnapped by old nemesis Imhotep as part of a quest to resurrect and control an army of jackals. The special effects come fast and furious. Rotting, reanimated corpses. Waves of scorpions, flesh-eating scarabs and voracious pygmies. Collapsing tombs. It's a headache-inducing, visceral barrage that seems determined to keep audiences from pausing long enough to realize how ridiculous it all is. Nonstop violence includes stabbings, shootings, dismemberment and Imhotep sucking the life out of people.

Worse than the body count is the film's theology. Reincarnation is a central story point as visions of a past life lead Evelyn to realize that she was the princess Nefertiri. Power comes from sorcery and occult chants (a reference to the "good book" leads one hero to consult a book of the dead in order to bring another back to life).

In the climax, Rick and Evelyn's marriage is more than affectionate; it proves to be a formidable, selfless force. Nice thought. If only it hadn't been shrouded by 2 hours of darkness.