**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring The Rock, Michael Duncan Clarke, Steven Brand, Kelly Hu, Branscombe Richmond, and Bernard Hill.
Directed by Chuck Russell & written by Stephen Sommers, Jonathan Hale, William Osborne, and David Hayter
2002 PG13
The Scorpion King (WWF star The Rock) is a bad guy in the flashbacks during “The Mummy Returns” but a good guy in “The Scorpion King,” which is set before those flashbacks ever took place. How he gets from being one to the other is never explained, nor does it need to be, because “The Scorpion King” exists on a plane of brainless goofiness where everyone would much rather beat your face in than listen to your explanation anyway.
“The Scorpion King” is essentially a long episode of “Xena” or “Hercules,” set in a nonspecific “ancient world before the pyramids” in which accents, costumes, weapons, and ethnicities are thrown together in a rainbow mishmash. Everything looks real old and that’s what counts. Every obstacle in “The Scorpion King” is resolved by a fight, usually starting with swords before descending to bare knuckles. There are swarms of fire ants, cobras, a camel, swords on fire, handshakes at the elbow, people who catch arrows out of the air, gunpowder, a catapult, and piles of broken furniture. I don’t think there’s a single set or prop that isn’t destroyed before the end of the movie.
The story linking together “The Scorpion King’s” virtually nonstop stream of fight sequences is that Memnon (Steven Brand) and his evil horde are trying to conquer all the ancient world and the ancient world doesn’t much feel like being conquered. So the Tribal Council of Old Guys sends The Rock to kill Memnon’s sorcerer, who has the power to predict the outcome of every potential battle. I stress the word “potential,” even though “The Scorpion King” does not, because it’s not really any good to predict the outcome of a battle if you can’t change your mind about whether you’re going to have that battle at all. The Rock is the man for the job because he’s an expert assassin and has the loudest sword this side of a lightsaber; it sounds like a helicopter warming up whenever he waves it around. Things go badly for The Rock, not the least of which being that the sorcerer turns out to be both a sorceress and a babe (Kelly Hu), and he spends the remainder of the movie out for Memnon’s blood. This leads to sneaking around Memnon’s palace, a swordfight in a sandstorm, picking up various sidekicks, being buried up to his neck to be eaten by ants, and a battle in a burning throne room with snakes everywhere.
The opening brawl is one of my favorites and, like a James Bond intro, has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. In it, The Rock fires ten arrows from his bow at the same time and they all hit different bad guys, who consequently go flying thirty or forty feet through the air to land on various pieces of short-lived furniture. This sequence is perhaps in homage to Robert Rodriguez’s “Desperado.” My other favorite is the chase through Memnon’s castle, which crosses “Conan the Barbarian” with Buster Keaton as The Rock plunges through windows, off balconies, and is fired out of a catapult without once heeding where he might land.
The Rock, who’s about the size of a Clydesdale up on its back legs, is more than up to the part, which consists of only about a dozen complete sentences before whaling on someone. One of those sentences could have deservedly been “you killed my brother so now I’m gonna kill you” but instead he opts for “I’ve come for the woman—and your head!” He shines most during several clever reaction shots, in which his eyes widen hilariously in the face of life-threatening absurdity. It’s fun to watch good actors work over silly dialogue, and Oscar-nominee Michael Clarke Duncan, who plays a warrior who initially distrusts The Rock, gets to say “you’ll pay for that.” Intermittently successful comic relief comes from The Rock’s horse thief sidekick. He sounds “ethnic” in the way that all sidekicks sound “ethnic,” even though by definition everyone in this movie should be “ethnic” to Americans.
“The Scorpion King’s” technical credits are decent, with good-but-not-great effects, art direction, and costumes in the vein of the last “Mummy” movie. The fight sequences are fast, dizzy, and frequent, with the athletic proficiency and near-perfection that, like most modern action movies, renders them tiresome sooner than the filmmakers would prefer. To their credit the fights are mostly bloodless, which is appropriate for a film this innocuous, and little splashes of humor are mixed in. Director Chuck Russell (whose directorial credits include questionable feats such as "Eraser" but who wrote the very clever "Dreamscape" way back in 1984) keeps the madness rolling as fast as possible and works in one or two pretty memorable crane motions.
The fault of “The Scorpion King” isn’t its absurdity—it’s not really any sillier than “The Mummy” or “Raiders of the Lost Ark”—but its simplicity. The movie works at only one level and without any depth; the plot is simple, the characters are neither complex nor do they escape their roles of hero and villain, and there are a few too many jokes that aren’t funny. Existing halfway between “Conan the Barbarian” and “The Mummy,” “The Scorpion King” is not as successful as either of them. “The Mummy,” while no great work of art, has more twists and turns, is more consistently funny, and features richer relationships between its characters. “Conan,” at the opposite end of the spectrum, includes the protagonist’s inarticulate quest for self-knowledge, as well as a dark atmosphere of almost no dialogue and an ancient world that is truly harsh and unforgiving. “The Scorpion King” cannot be faulted for its energy level—the drooling excitement of the filmmakers is palpable—but even at eighty or ninety minutes it’s probably thirty minutes too long for how simple it is. But that didn’t keep me from laughing.
Finished June 25, 2002
Copyright © 2002 Friday & Saturday Night