But, Boath hangs in there and, as the story progresses, you begin to like the boy. Oh, boy, I thought, another pretty, precocious child actor. At first, the kid comes across as too cute. Some new faces show up, too, with young Freddie Boath playing Rick and Evelyn's son, Alex. John Hannah is back as Evelyn's sniveling, high-maintenance brother Jonathan. Both characters are more symbol than anything else.
Oded Fehr is, once again, the stoic Ardeth Bay, a proud member of the Medjai, defender of the righteous and enemy of Imhotep. There are other familiar faces from the first film with Arnold Vosloo reprising his role as the ferocious Imhotep, who wants to take over the world and still has the hots for Anck-Su-Namun. Weisz handles the action stuff well and plays Evelyn as smart, capable and every bit as venturesome as Rick. Rachel Weisz gets to be an action heroine a la "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," as she goes toe-to-toe with her old nemesis, Anck-Su-Namun (Patricia Velasquez). Fraser melds the two sides of Rick together with a skill and charm that I've grown to appreciate in the actor. Now, he's a husband and a father and has a whole new set of responsibilities, but he still has the heart and soul of a swashbuckler.
Rick O'Connell used to be an independent-minded adventurer who only had himself to care about. Writer/director Stephen Sommers paid close attention to what worked and didn't in the first flick and honed it into a well-paced, sometimes funny, sometimes exciting, and always good looking, action adventure tale.īrendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz get the chance to develop, more fully, their characters from the '99 film. So, you didn't expect a sequel?Īnd, quite a sequel it is. Eventually racking up over $400-mil worldwide, it is the 31st highest grossing film, ever. When "The Mummy," loosely based on the 1932 classic starring Boris Karloff, opened in 1999 it was to record breaking box office numbers.