Oh, no, not again.

After the fun but forgettable "The Mummy" in 1999 and the less fun, more forgettable "The Mummy Returns" in 2001, it's time to watch more ancient corpses come to life amid digital effects laid on with a trowel. Again with the endless chases and the undead pulling their skeletons together to do battle, only to be stopped by swashbuckling heroes who can break the spell.

Tiresome and messy, "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" borrows mightily from the "Indiana Jones" franchise and various martial-arts films, not to mention Frank Capra's 1937 "Lost Horizon," but it doesn't do what those films did nearly as well. Director Rob Cohen and writers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar seem determined to water it down to globs of plot, strung between shapeless action sequences and humorless repartee. Only martial-arts superstar Jet Li triumphs as the mostly wordless evil Emperor Han of ancient China, a glowing magma spirit locked in a terra cotta shell.

Archaeologist/tomb-raider Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his adventurer-writer wife, Evelyn (Maria Bello, replacing Rachel Weisz from the previous films), live in bored retirement in 1946 England. They're thrilled when the government asks them to deliver a priceless gem to a Shanghai museum. Meanwhile, their son, Alex (Luke Ford), has dropped out of college and gone on a dig in China, discovering the emperor's mummy encased in a huge terra cotta sculpture. We learn in a long prologue that it was a sorceress (Michelle Yeoh) who put the emperor and his men under a spell.

The family reunites and squabbles in Shanghai, and, of course, the emperor reanimates, shape-shifts and leads them on a chase from Shanghai to Shangri-La. Whatever. The prologue was the best part.

-- Jane Horwitz (Aug. 1, 2008)

Contains violence.