The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

For the first Mummy film in seven years, kinetic action director Rob Cohen amps up the action and visuals and keeps everything moving at a breathless pace. The result is possibly the most fun Mummy yet.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is the best in the series, and from the looks of it, the most expensive.

Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is entertaining on a junk level, as long as you don’t think about how much money was spent to make the junk and how many other ways that money could have been put to better use.

Rob Cohen maintains a breakneck pace once things get up to speed, and the special effects are some of the most impressive yet seen in this colorful supernatural series.

Dragon Emperor succeeds largely through sheer excess: It's doubtful that any idea was thrown out for being too implausible.

Shot in part in mainland China, The Mummy is an acceptable installment in the series. Scripted by Miles Millar and Alfred Gough, the film is often lame. But the cast keeps it going.

The kind of fast-moving, mummy-butt-kicking action that is so much fun to watch in the summer. It's light entertainment. It just could have been better.

Tomb of the Dragon Emperor adds a fitfully satisfying coda to the most exciting summer for action flicks in years. But it has a tough time keeping up with Batman, Iron Man and, especially, the Joneses.

Fast-moving and mostly fun, but also overly familiar.

There's lots of bombastic, if familiar, effects and some awesome creatures. For a plot slowly trekking to Shangri-la and fresh eternal life, though, the energy and entertainment level peak only at mid-range.

There's plenty of lame dialogue, including a stomach-turning exchange in which archaeological terms such as "excavation" are applied to sexually desirable women.

There are so few surprises that one not only begins anticipating the next scene, but looking forward to the end.

Anyone in the market for an overblown and totally mindless adventure-comedy will certainly get his money's worth in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

Gleefully unabashed in its own inanity yet just focused enough to hold things together for a tight, schlocky thriller that could teach Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull a thing or two about 1930s-serial revivalism.

Light as popcorn without butter, the third entree in the Mummy franchise is munchable summer fare that goes down easy, staving off hunger for a while but not exactly satisfying.

Director Rob Cohen spends deadening stretches on the backstory, as if under the delusion it's just as important as the mad creepy-crawlies rising out of the sand. Wrong!

Tomb of the Dragon Emperor isn't nearly up to the mark set by the previous modern mummy movies, including the 2002 prequel, The Scorpion King.

The action scenes, like the performances, are hit-or-miss; a dash through Shanghai streets becomes so hectic you wonder whether the filmmakers blurred the images because they didn't have time to get the effects right.

There is one bit of good news. For all you abominable snowman fans out there, The Mummy is filled with yetis. And, boy, are they ever angry.

Fraser is as good as ever, and Bello is a welcome addition to the cast, but they can't save Tomb of the Dragon Emperor from its innate silliness.

While plenty of arrows zing, few of the wisecracks or familial confessions in Alfred Gough's and Miles Millar's script hit their mark. Fraser's grimaced delivery suggests he knows something here isn't quite working.

As half-hearted as portions of it are, you'd swear this summer movie "medley" exists simply to cash in on the success of the earlier Mummy films.

Despite the new setting, new adventure and new castmembers -- including the wife-swap of Maria Bello -- it still feels like they're beating a dead mummy.

It's serviceable summer twaddle, but you might as well see Hellboy II: The Golden Army -- similar plot, much better film. And you can't tell the story from the poster.

With an adventure-fantasy, a certain amount of creative license is to be expected -- even encouraged -- but this third installment of the Mummy franchise is nearly swamped by distracting lapses in logic.

When I go to a Mummy movie, I don't want ninjas and yetis and men turned to stone. I want embalmed corpses and hieroglyphics. I want pharaoh. I want pyramids and sphinxes and Ace bandages.

Hollywood believes that the more CGI crap it can cram into live-action movies, the more audiences will be impressed.

Full of exclamatory one-liners ripped from a copy of Indiana Jones for Dummies and with the breathless cast spewing putatively witty rejoinders that get drowned out by pows and bangs, Mummy 3 should have been kept under wraps.

Like the terra-cotta warriors who come to life in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, the movie is big, noisy, in your face... and pretty much hollow.

The film is an over-produced spectacle that’s crammed with lots of fiery chases, battles between a pair of computerized armies, booby-trapped tombs and a search for the pool of eternal life in Shangri-La.

This movie wasn't so much created as calculated.

A certain level of absurdity is expected in resurrected-mummy movies, and in that respect, this one doesn't disappoint.

Every vestige of the first Mummy movie's wit and charm is buried in an avalanche of noise and motion. It's exhausting.

This charmless, bloated exercise in eye candy is overstuffed with plot elements and rife with bad CGI and worse dialogue.

Harmless but worthless, Emperor puts no emphasis on anything, since nearly everything comes second-hand from other adventure movies.

The best thing about the movie is Fraser, who remains likably calm despite the deafening clamor that surrounds him. Still, even he seems to realize that it's time to let The Mummy rest in peace.

A noisy, low-rent action jumble, poorly directed by Rob Cohen and stuffed with stiff dialogue that's unintentionally laughable.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is a woeful ghost of its ancestors, which themselves were mere shadows of shadows. What started as an entertaining spectacle has become a spectacular bore.

Nine years after the first big-budget action Mummy and seven years after its follow-up comes this jokey, frenetic, overproduced three-quel.

Cohen has some fine and varied vistas at his disposal, thanks to the Chinese location work. But be they back-lot and urban or green-screen and rural, the action scenes grind on forever.

Third time is not a charm in this case. Besides a few cool action moments with Jet Li, this Mummy should have stayed buried.

Director Rob Cohen and screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar pad the picture with chases, explosions and fights, and the cast seems to be having fun. That's The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor -- a blast of fun hot air.

For kids who have seen only a few action-adventure movies, Dragon Emperor should be entertaining. It's loud, and has sort-of-scary monsters and some great computer-generated special effects.

Cohen opens with a deadly-dull 11-minute prologue, limits Li's presence to a cameo, wastes Michelle Yeoh and mounts computer-generated action sequences that are breathtaking in their idiocy.

If this is the best the franchise has left to offer, hopefully it will be allowed to rest in peace, entombed for eternity.

Had me on the edge of my seat -- as I slumped farther and farther down in my chair, realizing that I was seeing the lousiest action movie of the summer.

Fan as I am of Rob Cohen, one of the few never-stop-to-take-a-breath directors with an ounce of originality, there is very little here that doesn't seem like we've seen it before.

For the third installment in a franchise, its characters appear to have regressed instead of grown.

The whole affair seems so tired -- not just overfamiliar, but droopy and sad.

Under Cohen’s direction, the film is choppy, with action scenes quick-edited into obscurity.

Tomb is the kind of movie you sit through dreading the expository scenes, because the acting is so bad and the dialogue so pointedly written to make sure the little ones in the audience can keep up with the plot.

It's a good idea to bring a friend if you go to see the big climactic action scene of the new Mummy movie. That way, you can have someone nudge you awake when you start to nod off.

This Mummy belongs in a tomb with a stake in its heart or whatever it takes to make sure it won't rise again.

The new installment, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, fails despite being given the best possible chance of success, with Rob Cohen in the director's chair.

If movies were people, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor would be a total bimbo: nice-looking and kind of fun sometimes, but so unbearably empty and dumb that it doesn't matter.

Returns the summer movie season to its customarily crummy, empty-headed, disposable comfort zone.

The actor who comes off best in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is the one who opted out: Rachel Weisz. Everyone else flounders in the incompetently directed third Mummy movie.

A third instalment of The Mummy franchise is almost as inviting as the thought of a third term for George W. Bush.

Anyone seeing it will spend the following week pretending Tums is a food group.

Emotionally un-evolved, conceptually timid and, worse, no fun. It's also a raving, ear-crunching torment.

Three Mummy movies worth of cheese and not one of them is set in Wisconsin. Do America's dairy farmers know about this? And in The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, that cheese has curdled into the dumbest, most violent Mummy yet.

It's abundantly clear that this is one franchise that is dead in all but name. Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is little more than a cluttered, noisy, and unsatisfying thrill ride to nowhere.