Constant Viewer: The Mummy: Curse of the Dragon Emperor

The Mummy: Curse of the Dragon Emperor is not, rest assured, a French movie. In fact, it is in many respects an anti-French movie. It’s dumb and it knows it’s dumb. It may even be a little proud of how dumb it is as it revels in over-the-top action scenes and dazzling special effects. None of its characters have anything like an introspective or existential identity crisis or, for that matter, would know it if they did. There’s never a moment when the viewer has any reason to suspect that the writers or director or cast seriously thought “Oh no! We can’t do that! It would be too preposterous. The audiences will never buy it!” Nope, Mummy III knows it's all about the cheap thrills and delivers them up by the pallet load.

Brendan Fraser is the poor man’s Tom Hanks, assuming Hanks was dumb enough to try his hand as an action hero, eminently likable in large measure precisely because he’s an everyman type and not an action hero type. That he’s made a fairly nice film career playing against that obvious fact only goes to prove, as William Goldman so deftly put it, that in Hollywood nobody knows anything.

Jet Li makes a fine bad guy here and the rest of the cast are likewise as plausible as you’re likely to find in so implausible a movie. It’s all Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Lost Horizons meets every CGI battle scene made in the last ten years meets every zombie movie made in the last 20 years, and if the comedic touches sometimes wander into farce territory at least there’s not a single scene where someone languorously smokes a cigarette wondering what it’s all about.

In passing, you might wonder why on earth Mummy III and so many other movies in the last five or ten years have been centered in or at least had a major scene or two shot in China. There are no Chinese mummies, after all. Are there? Well, whether there are or not, this much is clear. There are a whole hell of a lot more Chinese than Egyptians and nowadays, unlike back in the old Red China days, more and more of them go to the movies or rent or buy DVDs. And here you round-eyed devils thought you were still the target audience!

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In response to a few comments from CV’s loyal readers about his recent evisceration of French filmmaking, it should be noted that CV’s theory of movie reviews is that it’s just practical emotivism. You find a reviewer whom you discover yells "Boo!" at the same movies you dislike and "Hurray!" at the same movies you like or even vice versa and then you've got a fairly reliable guide to help you pick what to see. Of course, it has to be tarted up a bit, but there's really nothing more to it than that.

There've been several mentions of noir, aka film noir, too, which is of course a French critical invention (film criticism being to movie reviews what prescriptivism is to emotivism). Hollywood just thought it was turning out B-movie gangster stories back then. Then again, Hollywood is almost always oblivious about those rare occasions when it accidentally creates art, too.

The thing about film noir is that it almost entirely contradicts the auteur theory if both are taken seriously. In the first place, these were almost all quintessentially studio movies, not directorial statements of any sort. None of the supposed genre’s directors set out to make a noir movie the way others set out, say, to make a screwball comedy or, for that matter, some socialist or communist writers were in fact trying to promote certain political themes in various post-war movies. (N.B., this isn’t an implicit defense of the notorious Hollywood Blacklist but simply an acknowledgment that some of the writers of that era were, in fact, intentionally polemical.)

These movies were all shot in black and white because, well, duh, just about all cheap movies were shot in black and white in the late 40s and 50s. Their cinematographic technique relied heavily on shadows and skewed camera angles because that was discovered to be a (cheap!) way to build psychological suspense and, frankly, just because it was trendy then in the same way those damned "let's swing the camera around the subject three or four times like an orbiting moon" shots are practically required by law in every movie made today.

Sure, there were a few movies of that era in which the female lead was a conniving vixen leading the poor, gullible protagonist to ruin, but you'd be hard pressed to make that claim about many of the most classic noir movies, e.g., Sunset Boulevard or even The Third Man. Finally, two of the greatest ‘noir’ movies of all time – Blade Runner and Chinatown – fit none of the noir theorists' criteria except the most important one: mood.

The fact is that the film noir genre is a garment that fits few movies of the era very well regardless of how many movies it will more or less badly fit here or there. It is, in the end, a hole that is neither round nor square nor any definite shape at all into which very, very few movie pegs can be fitted easily but just about any drama or movie of suspense can be pounded into with a heavy enough rhetorical hammer. So much for French theory, too.