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a tale of two movies

Two weekends ago, my wife’s cousin and I saw Dark Knight, then last weekend the two of us plus Missy went to see the new Mummy movie. Talk about a stark contrast.

I’ll start by saying that we were stupid. We went to The Mummy III without reading a single review online because we loved the first two installments so much. And my wife has a secret crush on Brenden Fraser, though I’m yet to get her to admit it. (The closest I got to a confession was, “I imagine that if you were a mummy fighting archeologist, you would be alot like Brenden Fraser.”)

There was really only one part of the movie I didn’t like: the part where the characters were talking. The action scenes were pretty typical of the Mummy series and were alot of fun. But I’m convinced that the writer must have outsourced the crafting of the manuscript to his/her 2nd grade daughter. It was so obvious, predictable, FORCED, cheesy, ugh. I nearly nodded off at one point. The only thing that kept me in the theater was the lure of an epic thousand-mummy battle like that which I had seen in the preview. It actually felt like they came up with a bunch of terrible one-liners, then tried to craft a movie around them, causing ridiculous build-up, then cramming them in at completely stupid times.

I can’t count the number of times one of the characters would say something like, “Oh no, if [insert villian] gets the [insert mystical object] to the [insert ancient shrine], he’ll be unstoppable!” It’s like they felt that the viewers wouldn’t be able to determine what things would be bad and would need to be stopped, and what things were good and should be done, so they revealed the plot in obvious, overstated dialog. It pains me to think about it even now.

So I highly recommend going out and seeing The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. No just kidding, in fact, I’d be careful when walking through the halls of the theater until this movie stops playing just be sure you don’t walk by when someone is leaving it early and accidentally hear some of the vomitous wretch of a script.

Tags: movies, review, the mummy

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 6:35 pmand is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “a tale of two movies”

1. Missy Says:
   August 6th, 2008 at 9:07 am

   HA! Well written, dear.

2. Ben Says:
   August 6th, 2008 at 10:52 am

   Crap – I really liked the first 2 as well. I guess, I will just wait and hope they come on USA in a few years.

3. Troy Says:
   August 7th, 2008 at 11:49 am

   Perhaps “vomitous wretch” was too harsh. “Blathering waste of time” perhaps.