Married With Movies: The Scorpion King 2 - Rise of a Warrior

Alert: Major spoilerage ensues. Not that it matters. I mean, come on.

I'm lucky that I'm married to someone who has tastes similar to mine where movies are concerned. There are, however, a few areas where we diverge. 1999's The Mummy, for example. Patrick loved it, and thought the film's goofy enthusiasm made up for any weaknesses in the plotting or script. I, on the other hand, just thought it was a clumsy, uneven, well-intentioned failure.

"It played like a really cool adventure game, or a well-run role-playing adventure, with a fun cast of characters," he tells me. "And besides, Rachel Weisz was awful cute."

That still doesn't make up for the gaping plot holes, dumb slapstick, and painful dialogue in my opinion, but that's fine, really. I'm OK with having the occasional movie on which we disagree. Except that they keep making more Mummy movies, and I have to go see them, and even Patrick agrees that they're terrible. Granted, this gives me the chance to gloat, since I use each sequel's badness as an argument that I was right about the first one (a perfectly valid point which Patrick stubbornly refuses to concede), but bad is bad, and I'd rather not have to sit through a crap movie if I don't have to.

And there are few film franchises that illustrate the Law of Diminishing Sequels better than the Mummy movies. Let's review:

The Mummy, 1999:
An often fun, occasionally awful Indiana Jones knockoff that served as an excellent vehicle for Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. And hey, there hadn't been any movies about mummies for awhile, so it was a fresh concept.

The Mummy Returns, 1999:
A loud, stupid, CGI-laden mess with the addition of an annoying kid, ridiculous coincidences (Weisz's character is a descendant of Nefertiti!) and a cameo by The Rock as the Scorpion King.

The Scorpion King, 2002:
Hey, people like The Rock. Let's make a prequel! And ignore any semblance of logic while jamming in all the special effects we can afford. The Rock plays Mathayus, an Arkadian assassin who gets turned into a half-scorpion after he gets a nasty bite and a lap dance from Kelly Hu.

Revenge of the Mummy: the Ride, 2004:
Director Stephen Sommers writes, directs, and appears in a pre-ride video attached to the Universal Studios attraction. Fraser picks up a paycheck as well, but Rachel Weisz is nowhere to be seen.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, 2008:
A truly abominable piece of crap that manages to waste both Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh. Sommers passes the direction to someone else, and the script by Miles Millar and Alfred Gough only proves why the last five seasons of Smallville have sucked so badly. Rachel Weisz is now gone entirely, and the movie is actually 100 percent mummy-free, despite the title.

And now we have the ponderously titled The Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior, a straight-to-video, prequel-to-the-prequel featuring the Ultimate Fighting Champion, Randy Couture (which sounds, by the way, less like a name for a wrestler/Jiu-Jitsu master than for a Boogie Nights-era porn star.) Couture's head is huge on the DVD box, and his name is above the title, but he's actually more of a third-banana. Couture first appears at the beginning of the film as Sargon, the bulky, shirtless "fight master" who's auditioning young boys for training as Black Scorpions, the elite king's guards/Ultimate Fighters of Ultimate Destiny. Sargon's something of a jackhole, and he hates young Mathayus' dad, who's the best Black Scorpion that there ever was. Since he somehow possesses black magic, Sargon is able to kill Mathayus' pop by sending the black smoke monster from Lost to cover him with scorpions. Kid Mathayus vows vengeance before going off with the other Scorpionettes to some sort of desert boot camp for six years.

Flash forward to the now more muscled Mathayus (Michael Copon) returning home from his training, looking like a floppy-haired member of a boy band who's spent a lot of time with a personal trainer.

"Who are you, Clark Kent? Pull your hair out of your eyes," Patrick said. "And what the hell is he wearing?" I paused the DVD to check out Mathayus' black leather, cropped breast plate that left his tanned, toned abs exposed.

"He looks like a gladiator stripper," I said.

In the interim, Sargon has become king in ways that are unclear, and he invites Magthayus to the palace. When Mathayus arrives, Sargon is having a sweaty, half-naked wrestling match with an underling while a gaggle of PG-13 hookers look on. The hookers are there to offset the inescapable (yet blandly unsexy) homoeroticism when the greased-up Sargon gives Mathayus the once-over and says, "I hear you're quite the swordsman." Yes, I know. Giggling at that is immature. You'd have giggled, too.

Sargon then illustrates how devoted his guards must be by telling one of them to stab a dagger through his own hand ("Well, that's just stupid," Patrick said. "It's a waste of a perfectly good henchman") and then hauls in Mathayus' brother, and instructs Mathayus to kill him. He doesn't, of course, instead killing all of the other guards, but not Sargon, because Sargon is magic, and he can send a magic guided arrow to follow Mathayus and his brother as they ride a horse out of town, which (of course) kills the brother.

"Yes!" Patrick cheered. "The brother was a load! And now Mathayus gets to cry unconvincingly, and seek even more vengeance. Because the vengeance over his dad just wasn't enough."

Using the crafty disguise technique of Wearing a Hooded Robe That Doesn't Actually Cover His Face, Mathayus sneaks around town, meets up with his childhood tomboy gal-pal Layla (Karen David), engages in some annoying, bickering dialogue that's supposed to be cute, and hops a ship to Egypt. On the boat they meet -- and seriously, I am not making this up -- Aristophanes (Simon Quarterman), who has an English accent and tells them about the Sword of Damocles, which would probably be a weapon good enough to kill Sargon.

In Alexandria, the newly formed team proceed with what Patrick calls the "killing of the poor innocent bastards who are just doing their job, while the good guys break in to steal something sequence," then fall through a hole in the floor into the Labyrinth, where they meet a burly military guy, a Chinese acrobat, and a fellow who's an uncanny mash-up of Gary Oldman and Eric Clapton. They then walk around the labyrinth for a very, very, very long time, and then kill a really bad CGI Minotaur. And then they walk around some more, until the find their way out and into the Underworld, which at first is a sandy desert but then turns into a thorny, drippy, mossy swamp full of dead spirits and carnivorous tentacle vine thingies.

"Maybe they'll encounter the Rodents of Unusual Size," I said. "That would be nice." The burly military guy says, "Nice place to visit, but ..." and Eric Clapton says, "We're all gonna die here."

"Oh, Eric Clapton," Patrick said. "You're so dour."

The group starts fighting amongst themselves for some reason, apparently because being in an underworld swamp sucks and makes them cranky. "Can't you see what this place is doing to us?" Aristophanes cries.

"Not really," responds Patrick. "Your acting isn't good enough."

Finally, they reach a cave, where they meet the goddess Astarte (Natalie Becker), who's sort of a Goth-y, pan-Asian supermodel. She furrows her brow and grumps, "I can destroy you with a wave of my hand!" and I was sure that she was about to throw her cell phone at them. Astarte cozies up to Mathayus, which makes Layla jealous, so ... chick fight! That is, after Astarte magically transforms her outfit into a hot, strapless corset ensemble.

Elsewhere, the party members with the Y chromosome wander off and find the sword. It's a broadsword, which enrages Patrick.

"Seriously?" I asked. "Now you take issue with authenticity?"

"But it's an 11th century broadsword!" he shouted. "They wouldn't have one of those! Even if it is magic!"

So they get the sword, head back to Arkadia, Mathayus has his showdown with Sargon while there's some elaborate genocide plot in motion at the town arena that involves spraying all the citizens with oil and then attempting to light them on fire with flaming arrows (don't ask), and a whole lot of really crappy CGI ensues as Sargon transforms himself into a giant, flaming, sometimes-invisible scorpion and stings Mathayus. Who, of course, survives, after stabbing Scorpion Sargon with the Sword of Damocles. Goodness triumphs over evil. The end.

"So wait a minute," I said, as the credits rolled. "This movie had guards called Black Scorpions, and Sargon turned into a giant scorpion for no good reason, just because the movie was about the Scorpion King."

"Even in the second Mummy movie, there was never any good reason for The Rock to become the Scorpion King," Patrick said. "It was just a clumsy retcon to explain why he had such a cool name in the first movie. I mean, he was turned into a half-man, half-scorpion, but what did that have to do with the prequels? Nothing!"

"So do you finally admit that all of the Mummy movies suck?" I asked.

"No, the first one still doesn't suck. The first one has issues, but it doesn't suck," he said. "I stand by that."

I suppose I should admire him for his conviction, but I still think he's wrong. And if they keep making Mummy movies, and they keep getting exponentially worse, soon they'll be so bad that they actually melt the audience's brain. Hopefully, we won't have to watch that one, too.

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