The Movie: I am reviewing the Pan and Scan version of this disc. There is a separately available anamorphic widescreen version, but pan and scan is the one Netflix sent me. Pooh.

To me, The Mummy Returns was not as good as The Mummy. Now I realize that both of these movies are supposed to be brainless mostly action with some comedy movies, but at least the plot of The Mummy made some sense. After The Mummy Returns was over, the more I thought about the plot, the less it made sense.

We start out about 10 years after the first movie. Brendan Fraser and that girl from the first movie are now married and have a young son. Somehow, someone gets the idea to resurrect Imhotep (the bad dude from the first movie). Then Imhotep would defeat the Scorpion King and then take over the Scorpion King's army and rule the world. There's a couple reasons why this doesn't make sense to me. First of all, why would someone go through all this trouble to dig up an old mummy so that the mummy (and not the people doing all the digging) can rule the world? Secondly, in the first movie, wasn't Imhotep more or less confined to his tomb, cursed to stay there forever? And now he can just run around all over England and Egypt as he pleases?

But, there is plenty of action in this movie to keep you entertained as long as you don't try to think too hard about how and why things are happening. But again, they just took a few too many liberties with the plot here and there, and that detracted from my enjoyment of this movie enough for me to know that I clearly liked the first one better. Oh yeah another thing I didn't like about this movie is that they waaaaaay over-did the sword sound effects. Every time someone unsheathed their sword or any sword moved around or made the slightest contact with anything you get this huge SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHWING noise, every single time. I got tired of it after like, the first 5 minutes.... and there was still 2 hours of it to go!

The DVD: This DVD is well, overly commercialized. You pop it in and after you hit "play movie" the first thing you see The Rock talking about his movie The Scorpion King and you see some scenes from it. This isn't a special feature, this is something that comes up when you start the movie! WTF!?!?

Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, I am reviewing the pan and scan version, so what I say about the video transfer here may not be entirely accurate for the widescreen version. The transfer was clean, with no visible dust or dirt floating around. The colors were pretty bold and bright, though the image did exhibit a tiny bit of visible ringing from edge enhancement, and I also noticed a tiny, tiny hint of gradient stepping. If this were an anamorphic widescreen transfer I'd probably rate it a 4.

The audio was clear, and crisp, with good use of the surround channels in all the places you would expect it. And the special features... well, there are so many of them that I don't care to list them all. But this is one of those cases where they put out a lot of quantity, and not a lot of quality. There's like one or two good special features on the disc, but the rest of it is just a bunch of marketing fluff reminding you not to forget to spend more money by watching the other movies and buying the video game and visiting the theme park attraction. Yay.

So what do you get with this DVD? You get a lot of mindless action movie, and a lot of marketing fluff, and that, my friends, is about it.