The Mummy Returns (2001)

Image credit: The Mummy Returns: Keith Hamshere

'MUMMY' DEAREST Fraser grapples with Vosloo

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The Mummy Returns

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When last we left them, Imhotep (Vosloo) was being sucked back into his tomb, Rick (Fraser) was riding off with Evelyn (Weisz), and Universal was riding its 1999 remake of the 1932 classic to a worldwide gross of $413 million. In the big budgeted sequel, the old gang (plus a few new additions, including an 8-year-old boy) are back in action 10 years later. And besides the return of a certain gauzy bad guy who just won't stay buried, there's another resurrection of sorts: Johnson, a.k.a. pro wrestler the Rock, makes his big screen bow as the Scorpion King, a character that's already inspired a spin off film now in production.

''The hard thing about making sequels,'' says Oded Fehr, reprising his role as swashbuckling Arab warrior priest Ardeth Bay, ''is that you have to somehow make it bigger, funnier, sexier, scarier -- but still keep the same things that made the first film a success.'' Another hard part: keeping Fraser alive. ''I blew out his knee in one scene, threw a disk in his back in another, and then broke one of his ribs,'' reports Sommers (who wrote and directed the first ''Mummy''). ''But he still invited me to his Christmas party.'' That's what we call goodwill toward men.