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Christian critic Michael Elliot came out of The Mummy Returns unimpressed. "This is The Mummy slightly repackaged, definitely revisited," the Movie Parables critic writes. "Watching it is a bit like having déjà vu because it sticks pretty close to the original formula." He notes that the film is "high on action and CGI effects but quite low on originality." Similarly, a critic for the U.S. Catholic Conference responds that this "overblown action flick is all non-stop physical confrontations and splashy special effects, with characterizations and narrative lost in all the sound and fury."

Mainstream critics are using adjectives that action movies try to avoid … like boring. FilmCritic.com's Christopher Null shrugs at what he calls "a bunch of cheap fright gags, lame jokes, and boring traps, all of which we've seen countless times before. For much of the film I simply sat there feeling bored." Boredom was the experience of Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert as well: "Imagine yourself on a roller coaster for two hours. After the first 10 minutes, the thrills subside. The mistake of The Mummy Returns is to abandon the characters, and to use the plot only as a clothesline for special effects and action sequences."

Peter T. Chattaway calls some of the film's animation effects "downright sloppy," and in his Vancouver Courier review he adds, "The acting is all over the map … from [Brendan] Fraser's reliable straight-man routine to Patricia Velasquez's clumsy performance as Imhotep's reincarnated lover." Another unfortunate characteristic of the movie, according to Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly—this mummy just isn't scary. "There's not one minute," she insists, "not one, when we need ever fear for the O'Connells, because we know all along that the monsters are made of pixels and, in the age of sequels, families populated by stars are always safe. Nor is there one minute when the mummies are awesome—like in the original 1932 Mummy—because we know all along that they no longer represent figments of our unconscious but instead represent the latest advances in CGI technology."

Looking closer at the film's dabblings in ancient Egyptian mythology and spirituality, some critics found a laughably self-contradicting mish-mash of ideas. At Christian Spotlight on the Movies, Kenneth R. Morefield noticed that when the movie's various and wicked spiritual forces lead to inevitable trouble, one character mutters "God help us." Morefield also noticed a scene in which a hero fights to escape being dragged by a demon down to the underworld; yet, when a child's dead mother is brought back from the dead, she offers to explain "what heaven looks like." Is there, then, a heaven in this world? If so, it must select its inhabitants at random. "None of this is intentionally heretical or even thought out," Morefield writes. "And I say it not because being unchristian in its worldview makes it a bad movie, but because being inconsistent in the world it recreates (Christian or non-Christian) is an element of an inferior fantasy world."

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May (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45