The third film in the mummy series, this time it's not so much a mummy they are fighting more an undead evil emperor with an army of terracotta warriors. Brendan Frasier returns as Rick O'Connel though they have got rid of a most of the orignal cast including Rachel Weiss who originally played Rick's wife Evelyn now replaced with Maria Bello. John Hannah makes a reappearance as the comic relief unlucky brother in law Jonathan Carnahan. They also manged to get Jet Li and even Michelle Yeoh in this film, which seems a little odd.

Anyway when writing this they obviously didn't have time to check the history books to find out the origins of the great wall of china (I happened to have seen a very good documentary on it not long ago on the bbc which told quite a different tale, a distinct lack of mummys) in this version of history a powerful warlord emperor sorcerer played by Jet Li wanted to take over China and probably rule the world or some such. He takes over china and then feeling his own mortality decides to search for eternal life. He dispatches his general to see a witch about some sort of potion or spell. The witch rather than a wizened old crone turns out to be Michelle Yeoh. Naturally the General and the Witch fall in love, however the emperor decides he likes the witch too.

The witch does a spell for the emperor he then betrays her and kills the general. It then turns out the spell is a curse on him and his army to turn them all to terracotta. He must never awaken or end of the world yada yada yada.

Flash forward to 1946 and the O'Connel's son Alex is busy digging the terracotta army and the emperor up. Suffice to say one thing leads to another and things go pear shaped the unspeakable evil of the dragon emperor walks the earth again.

It's a very pulp action film consisting of a high degree of CGI. There are some set action pieces (you pay for Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh some of the best martial arts actors out there and you would expect there to be some work for them to do).

It's a trashy action adventure film with a fairly silly plot with even more over the top action. Some of the action sequences are quite good and for the bits of the film he is in Jet Li is pretty impressive in action as always (he is probably my favorite martial arts actor).

The plot is paper thin the acting is alright though at times it seems Jet Li can't believe he got himself involved with this thing. There are some comedy elements but they don't really hang together very well.

This is trashy cheap action adventure fare, nothing much to it but a lot of CGI and explosions, the character are two dimensional and the acting nothing special. But if you want mindless action with no need to pay attention then this is probably the film for you.

I made a mistake when I was watching this film. At one point nearish the start I noted something that was similar (to the point of being practically identical) to a scene in an Indiana Jones film. I then spent at least a half hour thinking how much less good this film was at what it was doing.

After I shook myself out of it I was definately watching an action film. There was lots of fighting and rushing around. The characters had backstory and did interact but weren't exactly deep, but its an action film. This is the first Mummy series film I've seen, although I did see The Scorpion King, an offshoot of the same line.

One of the things that really struck me about it was that the comic relief guy was irritating. The lines were delivered fairly well, but always in a seperate cut of the scene and never relevantly.

Characters seem to receive plot information via some sort of psychic hotline - people who don't speak the same language seem to know the agonist family's surname, and a ancient general raised from the dead seems to know the exact nature of a curse that was cast while he was out of the room and in an ancient language he didn't speak.

That said, it is a series of reasonably captivating and pretty moving pictures at which you can stare and pass time enjoyably. Its not a good film, but it is watchable. Its a nicotine patch of a film that you could use to wean yourself off Indiana Jones or stave off the cravings until the next desecration installment in the new Indy series comes out