What you should never add to your film series: an annoying-ass kid who gets into trouble and gets your heroes into trouble thanks to his idiot hijinks. What you should add to your film series: The Rock as an ancient warlord who is gifted supernatural powers by Anubis and transforms into some weirdo scorpion-man-giant brought to life by shoddy cgi. But you don’t have to listen to me, I’m kind of an asshole. Rick and Evelyn O’Connel are still doing their daredevil archeology thing some eight years after the events of the excellent first film but now they’re married and have an annoying son running around and being a nuisance. Their most recent excursion is deep in a tomb containing some artifacts concerning the mythological Scorpion King who sold his soul to Anubis and lost his humanity. This leads to them discovering the Bracelet of Anubis and the map it contains which points to another “lost” location with a supposed treasure and more monsters. Imhotep is also back courtesy of some bad guys (one of them being the reincarnation of his dead lover) and he wants that damn bracelet so he can gain control of the Army of Anubis and take over the world. Their dopey son puts on the bracelet setting off a chain reaction which will bring the Scorpion King back in less than a week, the bad guys need the damn jewelry so the brat gets kidnapped (I would have just cut off the kid’s stupid arm and discarded his corpse in a London gutter), Evelyn is having vivid flashbacks to ancient Egypt coinciding with the Egyptian new year (never a good thing), Rick has a tattoo from his orphan days which marks him as an ancient protector (did that magically appear between this one and the original?) and Rachel Weisz somehow looks even better than she did in the first outing. Sexy Ardeth is back and smoldering, British Jonathan is also back and even more British somehow. We also get more screen time from Patricia Velasquez who excels at being a femme fatale. It’s cornier this time out but I don’t mind that at all because it fits the movie’s atmosphere anyways. Brendan Fraser is still his charming self and has great chemistry with everyone. Some of the magic is sadly gone (a lack of Kevin J O’Connor will do that), the effects are pretty iffy (outside of the Scorpion King himself who looks like something that you and your buddy Travis would laugh loudly at when it popped up in a Resident Evil knockoff for Sega Dreamcast… Citizen Wicked: Code Betty?) and that goddamn kid is all over the movie. Still, I enjoy it. There’s also little mummy monkeys and I’m not gonna hate anything with pissed off little mummy monkeys. We’d get Yetis in the next one but that’s about all I can remember.
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