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At the Movies
with Mark Moorehead

 

Film: The Scorpion King

Cast: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Michael Clarke Duncan, Kelly Hu, Steven Brand

Rated: PG-13

Director: Chuck Russell

Now Playing: Harkins Chandler Fashion 20, Harkins Arizona Mills, Centerpoint 11

Viewability Quotient: ** (bad)

 

You just can’t keep a dead man down in the desert. In The Mummy Returns, the Scorpion King (played by World Wrestling Federation-star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) is destroyed after being thrown into a hellish pit by Brendan Fraser. The Scorpion King the movie is a Mummy Returns spin-off, or loosely related prequel to both The Mummy and The Mummy Returns.

This latest installment is set a few thousand dusty years prior to the Scorpion King’s ultimate fall from grace; that may explain why the wisecracking Brendan Fraser is missing from this film.

While The Scorpion King is thin on plot and thinner on dialogue, the script was just right for W.W.F members.

Mathayus (a.k.a. Scorpion King) is a professional assassin given the task of killing a sorceress (played by Kelly Hu) working for the evil warlord Memnon (played by Steven Brand).

However, when Mathayus finds the sorceress he is stupefied by either her charm or lack of clothing, and this prevents him from carrying out his mission. Mathayus and his brother are arrested, and he witnesses his brother’s quick and unceremonious execution by the evil Memnon.

Mathayus soon escapes from the clutches of Memnon, vowing to return to avenge his brother’s death. Mathayus then returns to kill Memnon, fails in this effort, but does find the sorceress taking a bath and kidnaps her. And this guy calls himself an assassin? That’s the plot in a nutshell.

There’s plenty of W.W.F.-type wrestling action in this movie, and at one point I thought I was watching an outdoor arena version of the same kind of bouts seen on T.V., complete with fake head-to-head ramming and grinding arm-twisting.

It always amazes how these guys take such a thorough beating and then do a triple flip backward in the air, ready for more.

But, if non-stop action is what you’re looking for, in the absence of plot, this one has it. One endless sword fight with hand-to-hand combat from beginning to end is the best way to describe this film.

And, there’s no time to be bored. The Scorpion King is a brief 90-minute romp around a really big W.W.F. ring. The only thing missing is mud wrestling and women holding up placards during bouts.

What you will find truly surprising, in spite of plenty of scantily clad women and oversized, bare-chested macho men, is that there’s no gratuitous sex or vulgar language in this film.

I suppose the studio did this to secure a PG-13 rating in order to capture the target audience of teenage males with raging hormones.

But let’s not be cynical. Maybe Hollywood is moving in a new direction, where a film made for young people is still considered cool even without bad language and graphic sex.

Another credit to the studio is a lack of gore and graphic violence in The Scorpion King. Most of the swordplay and wrestling is tame if not a little tedious. We’re not subjected to explosions of gushing blood or flying severed limbs during each swipe of the blade.

It’s as if the filmmakers returned to the good old days, when it was assumed the audience was intelligent enough to understand what happened after one is run in with a sword. We need not see blood pouring out of a body to know a bad guy is dead. Perhaps that’s its charm. Just like a W.W.F. fight, we know it’s fake, but to those who enjoy such theatrics, it’s pure entertainment.

Scorpion King has its comic moments, too, and plenty of reminders that it does not take itself too serious.

In one scene, the Scorpion Kings’ babbling sidekick sits down at a bar in the ancient city of Gomorrah, looks at the waitress seductively and says, “Been working here a long time?”

Although this movie is fiction, it is interesting to note that The New York Times just reported that archaeologists have discovered that, carved in the limestone of a desert cliff in Egypt, is a 5,250-year-old tableau that depicts scenes and symbols of a victorious ruler called King Scorpion whose exploits, previously the stuff of myth and legend, may have been critical to the founding of the Egyptian civilization.

The Times claims this tableau represents one of the earliest forms of writing.  If this is true, then the real Scorpion King was probably more brain than brawn.

Perhaps he’s not pleased with Hollywood’s version of his life and desperately wants the world to know his true story. With the assistance of two intrepid archeologists, he just might succeed.

Pecan Groves resident Mark Moorehead writes regularly for Wrangler News.

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