You have to give them one thing, it looks pretty. The original The Mummy was smartly tongue-in-cheek and played its cinematic fluffiness well. Brendan Fraser returns as adventurer Rick O'Connell (one of the lousier heroic names of recent memory) in this third in the series. The sequel The Mummy Returns was a huge mess and failed to catch the charm of the first movie while also failing to be entertaining in its own right. The third in the series, The Scorpion King, was just embarrassing. Most franchises would have been deep-sixed after such an effort and relegated to straight-to-DVD productions with casts populated by nameless actors. This attempt to reignite the franchise has the mixed blessing of losing the misdirection of director Stephen Sommers (Van Helsing) only to have him replaced with Rob Cohen, a director who is quite adept at creating utterly thoughtless flash n' crash spectacles (xXx, Stealth, The Fast and the Furious).

Look for this to be pleasing to the eyes and quick paced but missing any real wit or intelligence. See the trailer below.