"The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor": some things should not be resurrected

If movies were people, "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" would be a total bimbo: nice-looking and kind of fun sometimes, but so unbearably empty and dumb that it doesn't matter.

If the first two in the series (1999's "The Mummy" and 2001's "The Mummy Returns") weren't exactly what you'd find on a double-bill at a Mensa conference, this one at least promised to change things up by moving the action to China and casting martial-arts deity Jet Li as the titular bad guy. In a lengthy prologue, a sorceress (martial-arts deity Michelle Yeoh) freezes the cruel D.E. into stone after he turns on her and the faithful servant (Russell Wong) whom he'd sent to track down an immortality-granting McGuffin.

A couple millennia later in 1946, Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) is squirming from boredom in opulent retirement with his wife, Evelyn (Maria Bello, after Rachel Weisz apparently decided the money just wasn't worth it). It's their young son, Alex (Luke Ford) who's doing the digging now, and he's unearthed the D.E.'s catacombs and remains. Apart from the fact that Ford looks more like Mark Wahlberg than Fraser, it's also creepy because he's only 13 years younger than the young-looking Fraser. The spirit of Jerry Springer practically screams for an explanation.

The lazily contrived estrangement and reunion between father and son result in tedious bickering and eventual cheesy reconciliation during big, loud, madcap action set-pieces that crib from Indiana Jones — infused with the two-guys-screaming aesthetic of the "Rush Hour" flicks.

Well-played, Ms. Weisz.

Along with John Hannah as Evelyn's goofball brother and beautiful ninja girl Isabella Leong, the O'Connell party races to stop the reanimated and elementally super-powered D.E. from putting a mystic thing in a magic deal. If they fail, he'll become even more powerful, he'll reanimate his terra-cotta army and he'll enslave the world well in advance of the Beijing Olympics. Why the Chinese general (Chau Sang Anthony Wong) who sets all this in motion is so thrilled by the concept never makes sense, unless he's simply a masochist with an authoritarian complex that would dwarf that of a White House press secretary.

The chase brings them all to the mythical mountain city of Shangri-La, invented by author James Hilton (who's not mentioned in the credits) and the setting for one of the greatest adventure films of all time, 1937's "Lost Horizon." Except in this Shangri-La there are fiercely cute computer-animated yetis who do a sort of Gooooal! cheer when they kick a bad guy through a building. They should share a beverage with the Coca-Cola polar bears afterward. The spirit of Ronald Colman screams for justice.

Director Rob Cohen was also responsible for "Stealth" (2005), "XXX" (2002) and "The Fast and the Furious" (2001). At the very least, you could say that subtlety isn't a part of his skill-set.

The excruciating dialogue — especially Hannah's — seems by and for the mentally deficient. He yells at the O'Connells, "You guys are like mummy magnets!" Amid battle of computer-animated undead hordes, he yells, "I hate mummies! They never play fair!"

I'm starting to hate 'em, too.

Mark Rahner: 206-464-8259 or mrahner@seattletimes.com