The Mummy Returns loves love, and it bets the emotional stakes of its climax on that theme. And, after abandoned Imhotep to his fate, she doesn’t have a supernatural boyfriend either. Unlike Evie, she doesn’t have a son or brother to use the Book of the Dead to bring her back. Justly or not (sometimes, you don’t want to risk your life to save your mummy boyfriend, OK?), Anck-su-namun is soon after narratively punished for her failure to love desperately enough, falling into a pit of scorpions and dying as she tries to escape the crumbling tomb.
When both Rick and Imhotep (aka the titular Mummy) hang above a pit that leads straight down to the underworld, unable to pull themselves up due to the hundreds of dead souls trying to drag them down, Evie risks her only-recently-restored life in order to pull her husband to safety.Īnck-su-namun does not, and a heartbroken Imhotep chooses to let go, succumbing to the eternal torture of the movie’s interpretation of the ancient Egyptian underworld, rather than fighting for a life in which the woman he loves does not love him back. Later in The Mummy Return‘s climax, it is the steadfastness of Rick and Evie’s love for one another that sets them apart from our villains. (There is so much kissing in this movie.) Probably because they were too busy making out. Instead Alex’s abduction is treated neither as Rick’s failure as a “protector” nor as Evie’s failure as a “nurturer,” as traditional gender roles would dictate they both fucked up because they are partners in this, and they let their kid get abducted by a mummy. (She does die in this movie… but she gets better. And there’s a great deal of fun in that, especially for Evie’s character, who would likely be figuratively massacred in another movie for failing as a mom. In this, they are both flawed parents and the movie doesn’t really care, by which I mean it doesn’t judge them for it. In The Mummy Returns, their distress is focused around the active threat to their son. In The Mummy, it’s not that Evie is never a damsel-in-distress it’s that Rick sometimes is also a damsel-in-distress-Evie literally saves Rick from a Cairo prison upon their first meeting. In The Mummy Returns, Evie is not treated as a nagging wife or mother, as she might be in another Hollywood tentpole, but rather as Rick’s partner in all things.
While The Mummy tells a much more familiar blockbuster story of Rick and Evie’s burgeoning romance, and one that is less central to the plot, The Mummy Returns doubles down on romance, depicting Evie and Rick as happily married parents going on adventures together, a subject matter modern Hollywood blockbusters have much less experience or comfort with. Romance in the action genre, which is often touted as the manliest of genres, has its place, but often as a rote subplot more than an integral part of the story. In storytelling, this often translates into sequestering romance into the more “domestic” of genres, such as melodrama or rom-coms. (Though a horrifyingly CGI Dwayne Johnson as the Scorpion King didn’t help either.) Traditional film criticism has long been primarily composed of men, who are traditionally socialized to view “girly” subjects like kissing, married life, and childrearing as firmly belonging to the domestic sphere. No doubt the movie’s willingness eagerness to lean into its lead characters’ romance, even after years of marriage and parenthood, played a role in the middling to negative reviews leveled at The Mummy Returns upon its release. Honestly, they’re not great parents-regularly leaving their kid to get kidnapped by humans and/or mummies-but they are fantastic romantic partners, regularly taking pause in the middle of a high-stakes scene in order to make out. (I believe some would rightfully call this imperialist grave-robbing, but I digress.) (You can have it all, ladies!) No doubt driven by Evie’s intense passion for ancient Egyptian culture, the two drag their precocious nine-year-old son Alex (Freddie Boath) from London to Egypt and back again in the pursuit of ancient treasures. Getting married and having a kid hasn’t slowed these two down. The Mummy Returns came out in 2001 and is set nine years after the original film when it picks back up with Rachel Weisz’ Egyptologist Evelyn “Evie” O’Connell (née Carnahan) and her husband, American adventurer Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser). While the franchise sequel has understandably not developed the same level of legacy as its predecessor, it’s honestly still pretty great and has some lessons contemporary blockbusters could learn from-namely, that there can be great power in a good romance.
We just passed the 20th anniversary of the release of The Mummy Returns, the follow-up flick to the 1999 blockbuster classic, The Mummy.