While The Mummy tells a much more familiar blockbuster story of Rick and Evie’s burgeoning romance, and one that is less central to the plot, The Mummy Returns doubles down on romance, depicting Evie and Rick as happily married parents going on adventures together, a subject matter modern Hollywood blockbusters have much less experience or comfort with. In The Mummy Returns, Evie is not treated as a nagging wife or mother, as she might be in another Hollywood tentpole, but rather as Rick’s partner in all things.
In The Mummy, it’s not that Evie is never a damsel-in-distress; it’s that Rick sometimes is also a damsel-in-distress—Evie literally saves Rick from a Cairo prison upon their first meeting. In The Mummy Returns, their distress is focused around the active threat to their son. In this, they are both flawed parents and the movie doesn’t really care, by which I mean it doesn’t judge them for it. And there’s a great deal of fun in that, especially for Evie’s character, who would likely be figuratively massacred in another movie for failing as a mom. (She does die in this movie… but she gets better. )
Instead Alex’s abduction is treated neither as Rick’s failure as a “protector” nor as Evie’s failure as a “nurturer,” as traditional gender roles would dictate; they both fucked up because they are partners in this, and they let their kid get abducted by a mummy. Probably because they were too busy making out. (There is so much kissing in this movie.)
Later in The Mummy Return‘s climax, it is the steadfastness of Rick and Evie’s love for one another that sets them apart from our villains. When both Rick and Imhotep (aka the titular Mummy) hang above a pit that leads straight down to the underworld, unable to pull themselves up due to the hundreds of dead souls trying to drag them down, Evie risks her only-recently-restored life in order to pull her husband to safety.
Anck-su-namun does not, and a heartbroken Imhotep chooses to let go, succumbing to the eternal torture of the movie’s interpretation of the ancient Egyptian underworld, rather than fighting for a life in which the woman he loves does not love him back. Justly or not (sometimes, you don’t want to risk your life to save your mummy boyfriend, OK?), Anck-su-namun is soon after narratively punished for her failure to love desperately enough, falling into a pit of scorpions and dying as she tries to escape the crumbling tomb.
Unlike Evie, she doesn’t have a son or brother to use the Book of the Dead to bring her back. And, after abandoned Imhotep to his fate, she doesn’t have a supernatural boyfriend either. The Mummy Returns loves love, and it bets the emotional stakes of its climax on that theme. If you’re open to romance as a powerful narrative tool, then this third act probably works a lot better for you than it does for those who are not, and are therefore left to judge the story’s success on the plastic face of a CGI Rock. (Note: this is not a comment on Johnson’s performance, but rather the movie’s poor use of motion-capture/CGI technology of the time.)
