The third part in Universal’s rebooted Mummy franchise takes the series in a new direction. Rather than set in Egypt and dealing again with the same old villain, Imhotep, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor brings us to China and gives us a different sort of preserved corpse baddie. And it looks like the change could actually add some freshness to the franchise.
Of course, history would hint that such a move for the Mummy movies is a bad idea. While it seems beneficial in theory to redirect the focus of a series with the third installment, especially if the first sequel was too much a repetition of the original (a la The Mummy Returns), in practice many threequels mistakenly alter things for the worse. These aren’t necessarily the worst threequels ever made (*cough* X-Men: The Last Stand); they’re just some movies that took their series in a completely wrong turn.
- Halloween III: Season of the Witch - Now viewed as an unfortunate detour in a long series involving the slasher Michael Myers, this misstep can apparently be blamed on John Carpenter and co-writer/producer Debra Hill, who agreed to a second sequel to Halloween only if it didn’t involve Myers. But what was the point? Sure, a franchise can work with unrelated sequels, but after two movies dealing with the same villain, it seems odd to switch it up so late in the game. Still, if this wasn’t such a terrible movie in general, it’s possible Halloween III could have worked as an intended beginning to an anthology franchise.
- Batman Forever - I typically like to consider Joel Schumacher’s Batman movies a separate series from Tim Burton’s, but the few returning cast members (Michael Gough, Pat Hingle) are evidence that this is indeed a threequel to the 1989 Batman. Not that you’d otherwise know it from the complete change in tone from dark to candy colored (never mind the recast Batman/Bruce Wayne). Hopefully Christopher Nolan will continue with the latest run so someone like Shawn Levy doesn’t take over and make the caped crusader silly again.
- Another Thin Man - Honestly, I could watch all of the Thin Man movies over and over until I die (Nora Charles is the most perfect woman ever written into creation), but this third installment of the alcohol-happy detective series commits one of the cardinal sins of sequels: it introduces a child. What fun is a couple of bickering, drunken lovers who also solve murders with a baby along for the ride? Even if the kid does end up being played by a very young Dean Stockwell by the fifth installment. The Mummy movies committed the same annoyance/error with the second movie (for Tomb of the Dragon Emperor the son is now thankfully an adult).
- Look Who’s Talking Now - While the Thin Man movies were good enough with a cute dog and didn’t need to add in a cute kid, the Look Who’s Talking movies were inversely just fine with cute, talking babies and didn’t need to add in talking animals.
- Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles - Yet another threequel guilty of having a kid add-on. But it also commits the other annoying sin of relocating the franchise to a new setting. The rural meets urban fish out of water stuff doesn’t work nearly as much in L.A. as it does in NYC.
- Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 - No threequel is going to be good if the main star drops out of the series and the sidekick attempts to take the place of the leading man. Well, maybe it would be okay if Iron Man 3 starred Terrence Howard only as War Machine, and maybe this movie would have actually worked if Jerry Reed stayed in the big rig and it was titled Smokey and the Trucker. But as it went down, the substitution just made us miss Burt Reynolds more.
- Home Alone 3 - As far as replacements go, I don’t know what is worse, changing up the whole character and family, as was done with Home Alone 3, which basically just repeated the storyline of the original movie, or the made-for-TV Home Alone 4, which recast characters from the first two movies. Either way, Fox should have just continued the series with Macauley Culkin, despite the fact that he was growing way out of his cute years by the end of the second movie. Home Alone 3 should have brought John Hughes back to focusing on high school kids and made it like a mix of Home Alone and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, in which a teenage Kevin throws a wild house party when accidentally left home alone. Again.
- Ghostbusters: The Video Game - I know that video games are surpassing the movies in terms of favored entertainment, but I’m pretty bummed that the third Ghostbusters movie has become a video game rather than an actual threequel.
- Superman III - Some of us may have a soft spot for both Richard Pryor’s appearance and the selfish Superman, but otherwise this threequel suffers dearly from having such lame villains. Especially after the awesomeness of General Zod and friends in part II. The wrong turn, though, is not just lame villains but the complete lack of Lex Luthor, a necessity for Superman movies for those of us who never read the comics and can’t get behind a pseudo Luthor like Robert Vaughn’s “Ross Webster”. Actually, I guess it’s not so much the lack of Luthor as it is the blatant substitution for him, as well as for the diminished use of Lois Lane. The franchise didn’t exactly get back on course by bringing Gene Hackman’s Luthor in Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.
- Friday the 13th Part 3 - It’s perfectly debatable whether or not this slasher series took a misstep when it gave Jason a hockey mask and made him an icon. Like a number of other horror franchises, this one became less scary and more amusing beginning with the third installment. Entertaining, sure, but a wrong turn for some horror franchises. It certainly didn’t help matters having that laugh track:
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