The sands of memories have already begun to pour against me.
I recently rewatched The Mummy and The Mummy Returns for the first time in decades, expecting a pleasant dose of nostalgia. What I wasn't expecting was just how dramatically my opinion of the second film had changed.
The Mummy is still fun to watch, but The Mummy Returns is terrible. For years, I had remembered it as basically more of the same. Bigger, louder, sure, but still a great time. In my memory, it was practically interchangeable with the first movie.
Reality was considerably less kind.
The second film is so much worse than I had remembered. There’s way too much CGI, and somehow, for whatever reason, I had completely forgotten that they didn’t simply use Dwayne Johnson for the Scorpion King’s key scenes. Instead, they turned him into that horrifying CGI creature.
Given how little screen time the character actually has, it seems baffling that they didn’t simply use Johnson himself for all of the Scorpion King’s scenes.
The plot becomes increasingly complicated in a way that doesn't actually make anything more interesting. Characters have secret past lives. Ancient lovers are reincarnated. There are magical bracelets, pyramids, armies of the dead, pygmy mummies, dog-headed warriors, and eventually a giant Scorpion King situation that somehow feels both inevitable and completely disconnected from everything else.
It felt as though the Scorpion King was included in the film solely to promote the spin-off released the following year.
At some point, I stopped trying to remember why everyone was going where they were going. I just watched it to get it over with.
It was so bad that I canceled my plans to binge-watch The Scorpion King and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, both of which left the streaming platform yesterday.