A lesson in disappointment…

Again the Late Summer Doldrums arrive. The second dead space in the movie release schedule is a bit more misleading than the earlier dumping ground of January-April where we know most of the movies are just crap.

Coming off the giant early-to-mid summer tentpole offerings that tend to have at least a 50/50 decent/bad ratio if we’re lucky, we get fooled into thinking that the cool trailers might just be for cool movies. But then we see the damn things and have our illusions shattered once again. Every now and then we get a hidden gem like The Sixth Sense, but is that just Hollywood luring us back to get a later beating? What’s saddest is when it’s a sequel to something we love or a thing that presses the right buttons genre/actor/director-wise. We always go back to the bad relationship to get that other eye blackened, don’t we? All we remember is the good times we had, so we don’t learn or listen, do we? Maybe that’s the case with the last two movies I sat through in midnight screenings. Last week it was the X-Files movie, this week it was The Mummy Part 3. From the opening “fish out of water” scene with our returning hero, to the “poor, unlucky, loveable bastard is walking into a possible sequel” scene with the comic relief character, The Mummy: Curse of The Dragon Emperor is at best predictable, at worst a badly made bit of crap. The jokes are obvious and overwrought, the action both unbelievable and dull, and the camera work is unoriginal and at times confusing. The acting is passable, even admirable considering the horrid dialogue and overwrought melodrama the script has the stars working with. The references to earlier movies just don’t amuse us much and I wasn’t really surprised when I noticed at least 2 people walk out of the not-so-crowded theater in the last half hour. The early trailers made this thing look like it might be fun, but all the good stuff is shown off. Don’t bother. 50/100.

I was a HUGE fan of the “X-Files” in the 90s. I was fairly religious about seeing the new episodes for the first three or four seasons, but drifted away from it a bit in the later years. I loved the first movie quite a bit as it really opened up the scope of things and worked as cinema. Even the soundtrack was larger than the TV show and still ranks up there as one of my favorites. So while I thought it might be a bit too soon nostalgia-wise for a second “X-Files” film, the fact that it was supposed to be independent of the larger “mythology” of the series had me hoping for the best. Series creator Chris Carter directed and co-wrote this thing and I really wish he’d taken more time with both duties. The movie isn’t bad per-se, it just feels under-worked. Like a so-so filler episode of the series, it presents some interesting ideas, but fails to really grab us. That being said, there are lots of nice character moments for old fans of the show, and Gillian Anderson’s Dana Scully is given a very nice arc to work through and plays it very well. What the movie most feels like is a re-examining of the show in the post-9/11 world that the show just barely saw the beginnings of. In fact it would be a decent pilot for a new series that would improve greatly over time. The last half-hour is where the film hits it’s stride, but it just takes too damn long to get there. 68/100. (Oh, and fans of the show should sit through the credits for what might be a fitting farewell to all things X-Files.)

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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."