You know…I’m not sure Mark Twain ever actually said: “If you’ve got a nice corpse, fetch him out!”, but the fact that Morgan and company actually started off their flick “The Kung Fu Mummy” with a bogus Twain quote is just proof of what exactly we’re going to be dealing with here.
A mummy, stuffed with over two hundred million dollars in jewels and buried under a sheet of plywood and about three inches of dirt, has been brought back to life in the midst of modern-era Hollywood. And the chase for our drinkin’, fightin’, screwin’ kung fu badass bandaged walking dead will go from Hollywood all the way to Las Vegas.
Okay, so we’re shorter on logic than the Republican National Committee, as evidenced by the fact that Morgan and company have to resort to topless chicks within the first two minutes, a sure sign that we’re not in for any kind of joy here. And as the next several minutes will clearly show, logic is going to be in real short supply for the Kung Fu Mummy experience. Watch as the bedside clock radio our main character wakes up to goes from 11:34 to 12:56 in the space of just three seconds. And there are plenty of other moments like this.
Which isn’t to say this won’t be a comic extravaganza–watching our liquored-up detective drain a bottle of Jack, use the empty to beat the hell out of his alarm clock, and then wander into the bathroom to get a beer out of his medicine cabinet which he opens with his teeth and uses to rinse his mouth is the exact sort of thing we’ll be seeing all through the movie.
Yes, it’s cheap. It’s cheesy. It’s got more filler than off-brand parmesan cheese. But you know what? It’s funny. And in the end, isn’t that what matters? Especially if you have the sense of humor of a fifteen year old boy, or can at least enjoy jokes geared toward a fifteen year old sense of humor.
All in all, if you’ve got a thing for scatological and / or sexual humor, breakaway furniture, and some guy’s vacation videos, then you’ll probably get everything you want out of “The Kung-Fu Mummy”. As for the rest of us, well, you should get at least a couple good laughs out of it.
