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Last Updated: Sep 12th, 2008 - 10:16:31 |
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| "Mummy"--the newest ode to the White hero. |
There is a news story circulating on the Internet about how actor Danny Glover scratched and clawed for funding to make his forthcoming film on Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture. Glover told Agence France Press how investors protested that his script didn’t have any “White heroes.” Of course, the line between that news story and this review of “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor” is obvious to all you savvy film lovers.
This is the third in the franchise of "Mummy" movies, which, in the past, have involved some rich Brits (White heroes) traipsing all over Egypt, desecrating the graves of long-dead Africans while searching for treasure, and then the defeating of some re-awakened and ill-tempered corpse. With the series debut in 1999, these movies seemed to pick up where movies like “Indiana Jones” and “Romancing the Stone” had left off and revived the old-fashioned (racist), serialized adventure for a new generation.
Central to the success of these adventures is identification with the White hero who, typically, is foraging into some area of South America, Africa or Asia for who knows what. In this movie, actor Brendan Fraser reprises his role as Rick O’Connell and Maria Bello plays his wife Evelyn. The couple lives with their servants in the sort of old English mansion where all such British protagonists seem to live. On their adventures—we wouldn’t really call it work—we might imagine that they are simply revisiting the formerly colonized places that brought their family such fantastic wealth. Despite their lazy existence, they are no slackers and can brawl with meanest darkies and mummies and always—though bloodied and jacked up—emerge victorious.
In this story, they travel to China where, to their surprise, their son Alex, who is supposed to be in college, is excavating the tomb of a notorious ancient Han emperor (Jet Li). When Alex is tricked into re-awakening the emperor, the family is thrown into a new adventure to save the world from an exhumed tyrant. That adventure takes them from the streets of Shanghai, to the Himalayas, to the mythical place known as Shangri-la. Of course, there is plenty of action and literal fireworks on this mission to save the world.
This predictable part of the movie is just that—predictable. But this sequel gets a lift from the tight martial arts action from Li and Michelle Yeoh (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) who plays Zi Juan, a witch who is in eternal conflict with the evil emperor. The insertion of Zi Juan and her daughter Lin allows the O’Connell’s to also join forces with some natives and blunt the imperialist overtones of their mission. A quasi-romantic vibe between Alex and the witch’s daughter updates the narrative for a more diversity-minded generation.
During this summer, when we have had ample a special opportunity to contemplate the role and place of the Black superhero, movies like “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor” remind us of how movies choose a historical narrative to tell us who the hero is, who the villain is and, always in these international tales, how the villain is always the darker brother.
This review also appeared on Tom Joyner's BlackAmericaWeb.com,/i>
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