Dracula's Jet Li Studies

I’m sure it will be when the current contract expires.

The Mummy: Curse of the Dragon Emperor (2008)

Jet Li started his Hollywood career by playing a villain in a belated last installment of a popular franchise and he sort of ended it the same way. That first movie I’m talking about was of course Lethal Weapon 4 in which he was mostly wasted and that second film is The Mummy: Curse of the Dragon Emperor, in which he is completely wasted. But let’s start by taking a step back and reflect on this mummy franchise. I distinctly remember going to see the first The Mummy when it came out back in ’99. I was about eleven at the time and I fucking loved it, thought it was just about the best time I ever had at a theater. Granted I felt that way about half the movies I saw back then but this one had to have been doing something right. It was also one of the first DVDs I ever owned and I ended up watching it several times. Does it actually hold up? Not sure, but I have my doubts and I kind of want to avoid re-watching it and ruining it for myself. Two years later that movie’s sequel The Mummy Returns came out and I was pumped for it. Went to see it on opening day and man was that a letdown. That sequel was misfire that put way more emphasis on the first film’s interest in spectacle and questionable CGI than it did on the swashbuckling charm that actually made the first movie so refreshing and it really had nowhere interesting to go with its characters and story. In retrospect I think my distaste for that sequel represented a bit a maturation in the way I responded to cinema; I was thinking about movies more critically and wasn’t just lapping up whatever Hollywood was hyping up… at least to some degree.

As for this ill-fated third sequel… I never even considered seeing it in theaters and if not for this Jet Li retrospective I probably never would have thought to even give it a look. That’s how much this franchise had fallen in my eyes, though given that I actually paid to see The Scorpion King spin-off in 2002 and the Van Helsing movie in 2004 that probably has less to do with how bad The Mummy Returns was and more to do with the fact that they just waited until long after I’d stopped caring to make the damn thing. This third Mummy movie cam a solid seven years after the previous movie and that is kind of the worst span you could have waited: not long enough to build nostalgia and anticipation but too long to have the previous movies fresh in anybody’s head. On top of that, by the time this third movie came out I was a completely different person. I was in middle school when The Mummy Returns came out but I was two years into college when The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor came out, and it wasn’t just me, my whole generation had moved on: no one was asking for this. However, the failures of this movie cannot just be explained by its tardiness. The very next year The Fast and The Furious franchise managed to come roaring back after nearly as long of a wait since an installment with the original cast. I certainly didn’t see that coming but for whatever reason people were far more willing to welcome that series back with open arms than this one and that might have a lot to do with the fact that the movie never really gave them a reason to.

We have to start with the fact that making a Chinese themed Mummy movie seems like kind of an odd move in general. I can see where the instinct to shake things up came from and the opportunity to suck up to an emerging film market also probably made a lot of sense to the suits in charge, but mummies as monsters are inherently tied to Egypt and repurposing The Terracotta Army as the new mummy horde seems like a stretch and a half. Additionally they really have nowhere to go with the human characters here. Brendan Fraser and John Hannah are the only returning cast members (they straight up re-cast Rachel Weisz’ character with Maria Bello), and Fraser’s character is at this point fully domesticized and has nowhere new to go with his arc. As for Jet Li’s character… totally unoriginal evil conqueror dude. They basically make the same mistake with him that they made with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in The Mummy Returns: establish him as a bad conqueror in the prologue, keep him off screen for 80% of the rest of the movie, then bring him back at the final hour but as a CGI monster. They were self-aware enough to have some of regular old Jet Li in some of the film’s third act rather than have him be a CGI dragon for the whole thing, but he isn’t very talkative and the kung fu choreography in his few fight sequences is nothing special.

It should be noted that this sequel was directed by the hack-tastic Rob Cohen, director of the first The Fast and the Furious as well as some even lower brow nonsense of the era like xXx, Stealth, and Alex Cross, rather than the original Mummy helmer Stephen Sommers. Make no mistake, Sommers is also a studio stooge who has not made a single good movie outside of the first The Mummy, but he at least has sensibilities that seem to match the material better than Cohen. At his best Sommers (who hasn’t made a movie since 2013 and who I think has basically retired from filmmaking) always struck me as a sort of overgrown twelve year old who’s kind of like a (really really) poor man’s Spielberg. Cohen by contrast is like a cigar comping executive who thinks he knows what teenage boys like (cars, boobs, nu-metal) and cynically puts together movies that deliver these things in simple PG-13 packages. Here Cohen (who has since had some really unsavory #MeToo accusations leveled at him) is self-aware enough to avoid some of has baser inclinations with this movie, but you can tell his heart isn’t in it and that he’s just trying to photocopy the style of those earlier movies in the most soulless way possible. The rub is that the final movie doesn’t feel completely incompetent, just lifeless. It’s a cash grab no one asked for and which no one had their heart in. It even sets up a planned sequel (which was meant to be Aztec themed and feature Antonio Banderas, likely in a prolog and as a CGI thunderbird at the end) but that never got made even though the film actually quietly made $300 million in the international market (because China pandering works sometimes) and Universal instead decided to pivot to their moribund Dark Universe idea.
** out of Five

In Conclusion
And that is where my journey into the Hollywood career of Jet Li will end because in many ways that is the end of his Hollywood career. I don’t think this was because American audiences were any less interested in him than they used to be (though I think some of the excitement that had been there in the early days had waned) but more because it became increasingly clear that Hollywood needed him more than he needed Hollywood. China was becoming a bigger and bigger film market and if he can make blockbusters in his home country he has little reason not to do that rather than make weird shit with rappers like Cradle to the Grave or compromised crap like The Forbidden Kingdom in Hollywood. He does at least keep his toe dipped in the Hollywood waters just to remind Westerners he’s out there and keep his options open in case he gets sick of making government mandated statements critical of the Hong Kong protests. He was there in The Expendables and its sequels, which were advertised as a nostalgic reunion of 80s action stars but were in many ways actually an intergeneration meeting of old action stars (like Stallone and Schwarzenegger) with the refugees of the 00’s action boom like Jason Statham and Jet Li. Li also apparently plays the Emperor of China in the new Mulan remake that may or may not be coming out this year depending on if we get this fucking Coronavirus under control, so there’s that, but for most of the 2010s he’s been primarily working in The Middle Kingdom. But even there he hasn’t been working at nearly the pace he used to. There have been some reports that he’s been fighting health issues but he claims he’s over that and has just been distracted by family concerns and charity work. Either way he’s been a bit on the ropes as of late, but I hope he can make a comeback. He wasn’t the best martial artist, or the most amusing performer, or the best actor, but dammit, he was my generations kung fu guy and we love him just the same for who he was and what he did.

And hates.

Mummy 3 is better than Mummy 2.

That's shit, yeah.  No getting around that.  And the kid is a bit much.  But the rest of the movie is still fun.  Brendan Fraser is still charming as fuck in it and crackin' good one-liners, there's a rousing Alan Silvestri score and the action sequences are still a blast.  Particularly the one on the double-decker bus.

To me, Brendan Fraser is kind of the problem with both sequels (though my memories of Returns are hazy), not him so much but more that I don't think the scripts knew what to do with the character once he stopped being a borderline criminal and became a married rich guy.  Then a lot of the rest of the movie is just a retread of the first movie but with less creativity and charm.

Honestly I might prefer Van Helsing to Mummy Returns... well, maybe I don't.  I will say that Van Helsing at least had certain moments of creativity that I appreciated and wasn't just an inferior version of a previous film, and that's something.  Maybe it's been too long since I've seen either to definitively say.

Time to Re-Evaluate some Bad Movies, methinks...

Say what?

More movies should have the the People's Eyebrow. Hell, maybe even the People's Elbow.

Also, doesnt the decline of Fraser's films as an actor more or less align when he was assaulted in 2003?