By Aimee O'Connor

** "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emporer"

Just as last summer existed as a sputtering threequel jamboree (pirates and ogres and sassy bi-racial action duos, oh my!), this summer is beginning to meander into a peddling pageant for the resuscitated franchise. After Indiana Jones cracked quips and a whip in May, and the Hulk sulked and smashed in June, Brendan Fraser and a host of the undead return to the big screen this month, resurrecting a blockbuster franchise that surprised many naysayers with its fruitful success back in 1999.

Who knew that a loose remake of a 1932 Boris Karloff horror classic would rake in such a substantial profit, $415 million worldwide, thus turning Brendan Fraser, previously meddling around in live action kid flicks and ho-hum romantic comedies, into a prospective, saves-the-day-with-a-smile, Bruce Willis-esque action star?

Of course, after the success of Stephen Sommers' "The Mummy," which spawned a sequel and a spin-off movie starring The Rock, the franchise's most respectable claim to fame was introducing mass audiences to Rachel Weisz, future Best Actress winner for 2005's conspiracy thriller, "The Constant Gardener." But the franchise was never meant to be anything but campy fun, and so it came, went, reigned at the box office, and Brendan Fraser the action star blew away like an undead sandstorm onto a shelf in a celluloid closet somewhere, waiting to be polished off and set free in another high-octane horror flick.

Director Rob Cohen, he of brain-dead muscle-fests such as "The Fast and the Furious" and "xXx," picks up where Sommers left off, pulling Fraser away from substantial dramas and ... more live action kiddie flicks, to fight some more computer-generated creatures and zombie lords in the third installment of "The Mummy" franchise, "Tomb of the Dragon Emporer."

Relocating our threequel from Egypt to China seems like a logical progression, too bad the thin script is as wearisome as a battle with a mythical CGI monster, and oh look, there's a scene in which our heroes battle a computer-generated, three headed dragon, go figure. Fraser returns as the formerly fearless explorer Rick O'Connell, as Maria Bello replaces Weisz in the role of his adventurer wife, Evelyn. The couple's grown son, Alex (Luke Ford, 13 years Fraser's junior, such a small gap in age certainly rears head-scratching believability but then, so does battling mummy armies and yetis so I begrudgingly digress), makes up for his parents' pragmatic existence by accidentally awakening an evil and power hungry Han Emporer (Jet Li), previously cursed and frozen in time by the scorned and double-crossed sorceress Zi Juan (Michelle Yeoh).

The O'Connells now have more on their plate than languishing in their palatial mansion. They have a terra-cotta army to fight, martial arts to endure, and some cheesy wise-cracks to spout out while doing so. The direction is bouncy and uninspired, matching the film's phlegmatic plot, hobbling along and existing as a sequel for the sake of sequel.

Big budget stinkers should be a ritual expectation in the summer, but as each season passes, such a budget is often pooled into either an unnecessary succession, an adaptation of a comic book or cartoon, an assembly-lined computer animated, anthropomorphic feature, or a little bit of all three rolled into one.

We've lucked out this year. With "Wall-E" we found an animated film with meaning, with "The Dark Knight" an adaptation with significance. But with every useful warm weather blockbuster there exists a handful of mis-steps. Cohen, Fraser, their army of mummies, and their plethora of wilted witticisms is a text book summer mis-step, another entry in a franchise that should have stayed encased in a tomb many years ago.

- Now playing at CinemaWorld, Lincoln, 622 George Washington Highway, 401-333-8676, cinemaworldonline.com.