The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Universal

At Quality 16 and Showcase

1.5 out of 5 stars

If you ever wanted to see what a Harvard graduate setting $145 million on fire looks like, here’s your opportunity.

Welcome back to Brendan Fraser’s “Indiana Jones” karaoke hour where no imitation is too sloppy, and the costs (money, taste, sanity) are never too great. “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor” wants to resemble the spectacle of genuine Chinese fireworks, but it winds up feeling like the crappy knockoffs you can get on I-94 through Indiana.

Taking place after “The Mummy Returns” (2001), Rick O’Connell (Fraser, “Journey to the Center of the Earth”) and re-cast wife Evelyn (Maria Bello, “A History of Violence”) are now retired as adventurers. At least they’re retired for the sake of irony, because they unwittingly get pulled into another adventure. Their 20-something son Alex (Luke Ford, “The Black Balloon”), who was eight in the last movie (and his parents are still in their 30s?), has grown into another archeologist-adventurer. What a surprise.

Alex has awoken the evil Dragon Emperor Han (Jet Li, “Fearless”), and now the O’Connells must stop the evil force from conquering the world. The rest of it, well, has already been put to rest. Many times. Chases, visual effects, mystical artifacts, bad dialogue, poor stylistic decisions, video-game exposition and about a million other things we’ve already endured pop up at some point in “Emperor.” Proving yet again that third films in franchises are almost always the worst (“Spider-Man,” “Superman,” “Rambo” and so on), “Emperor” is no exception.

That’s not to say all is lost here. There are yetis. That’s right, yetis. In the middle of a gunfight a mystic summons the aid of abominable snowmen to kick the bad guys’ asses. Yeah, it sounds just as stupid as the rest of this thing. But, hey, at least we’ve never seen that before.

Expensive and over-the-top, this feels like the product of bad committee-thinking and power-lunching, where no idea is rejected by the filmmakers. Too bad the writers’ strike had to happen. Otherwise, crap like this wouldn’t have been rushed into production. Only coked-out execs with deep pockets think that dragons-versus-mummies-versus-machine guns would be awesome. Sans narrative. Well, it could be awesome — if it were executed with a wee shred of intelligence.

Rob Cohen, the director, is a Harvard graduate. What the hell happened here, then? Not to get into rankings or rivalries — I know my place — but shouldn’t that degree produce a man that makes films with more thought and care? Instead, he gives us junk like “XXX,” “Stealth” and “The Fast and the Furious.” It really is who you know, isn’t it?

Cohen’s a 59-year-old grown man, and yet he’s spending money to show us crotch-hits and crappy CGI. I don’t know whether this says more about himself or his audience.