Fantasy Flix: The Scorpion King (2002)

Sunday, March 11, 2012

The Scorpion King (2002)

Director: Chuck Russell
Writers: Stephen Sommers (story), Jonathan Hales (story)

In an ancient time, predating the pyramids, the evil king Memnon is using the psychic powers of his sorceress Cassandra to fortell his great victories. In a last ditch effort to stop Memnon from taking over the world, the leaders of the remaining free tribes hire the assassin Mathayus to kill the sorceress. But Mathayus ends up getting much more than he bargained for. Now with the help of the trickster Arpid, tribal leader Balthazar and an unexpected ally, it's up to Mathayus to fufill his destiny and become the great Scorpion King.

The Scorpion King was notable for two main reasons. First, this is a spinoff of The Mummy franchise, which was initially a big success for Universal. The second is this being Dwayne Johnson's (The Rock) first leading role.

Dwayne Johnson does a pretty good job here in his first big role. He has definitely improved over the years. But I'm a pretty big fan of most of the stuff he does. I think Dwayne Johnson just reaks of charisma and he uses it well here.

Of course, I can't do one of these mini-reviews with talking about the ladies in the film. Kelly Hu is stunning and I fell in love with her from the first time I saw this in the theater. She's a decent actor as well. There are other pretty faces here, but none of them hold a torch to Kelly.

The rest of the actors are pretty good. I always enjoy Michael Clarke Duncan when he's on screen. Grant Heslov is quite entertaining as well.

The Scorpion King doesn't seem to take itself too seriously, and I think that was a good choice. This is just good clean fun. The action is well done, and the humor is well placed. There's no nudity or blood and gore here, so I think this would be fine for some older kids.

So far, there have been three Scorpion King movies. I think I saw the second, but don't remember it too well. The third just came out and I haven't seen it yet. I'm sure I'll be reporting on those soon.

Overall I think The Scorpion King is alot of fun and kind of gets a bad rap. This is not meant to be anything more than what it is and I think it does a good job at entertaining.