"C" Rating by Robert W. Hammerle

The best thing about the third, and hopefully last, of Brendan Fraser's Mummy series, "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor," is the computerize graphics. Ranging from vicious but friendly abominable snowmen, a flying three headed dragon, a large army of rampaging skeletons and the wonderful Jet Li morphing back and forth into a decaying, fiery corpse, they are as good as you will see in any action movie released this summer.

In addition, the appearance of the aforesaid Jet Li makes almost any movie watchable on that basis alone. Unfortunately, other than the fact that he is continually rotting away, he is given precious little to do.

Furthermore, "Mummy III" suffers from the fact that it can't figure out what type of movie it wants to be. On the one hand, the great Michelle Yeoh is quite convincing as the sorcerer who initially puts the evil Mr. Li in the deep freeze. Equally compelling is Ms. Isabella Leong, who plays her daughter who has guarded the secret Tomb of Mr. Li and his army to make sure that they are not reawakened to wreck havoc on the world. The best moments of this film are when these two exceptional actresses are on screen.

But while Brendan Fraser's hapless, wisecracking anti-hero worked reasonably well in the other two Mummy editions, he is simply hapless here. I like Mr. Fraser as a general rule, as he always comes across as good-natured and sincere. Here however, he does little more than mug his way through multiple near death experiences, robbing the scenes of any type of emotional impact.

Finally, the incredibly gifted Maria Bello takes the place of the equally gifted Rachel Weisz as Fraser's wife. Bello has given some memorable performances in "The Cooler" (2003), "A History of Violence" (2005) and "Thank You For Not Smoking" (2006). In this case, however, she's literally along for the ride in this lightweight fare.

But what really kills this movie is that it concentrates on Fraser and Bello's adult son, played by the woeful Luke Ford. He is as wooden as he is uninteresting, and his acting is only slightly better than Pierce Brosnan's singing in "Mamma Mia." Whatever chance this movie had of rising above its pedestrian dramatic mediocrity was lost by the unfortunate decision of director Rob Cohen to center much of the plot around the lackluster Mr. Ford.

What partially saved this movie for me was the fortunate fact that I took my frequently mentioned two grandchildren. Despite its obvious weaknesses, the movie was sophomorically scary enough that, combined with the special effects, the kids were highly entertained. From an adult perspective, however, I'm afraid that is damming a movie with faint praise.

But for any "Mummy" true believers still in the crowd, let me close with reference to a scene where an aging prop plane containing our heroes and an extraordinarily hairy Tibetan Yak lands in the Himalayas. As the plane comes to rest on the edge of an enormous precipice, someone in the plane asks, "What's that smell?" The camera flashes to the rear of the plane where John Hannah (reprising his annoying sidekick role) and the animal are covered with white goo. At that memorable moment of cinematic history Hannah responds, "The Yak Yakked!" Enough said.