Smackdown BC

The people responsible for the abomination of last summer’s The Mummy Returns try to atone with The Scorpion King, a completely empty-noggined but blissfully breezy chunk of action camp featuring ex-WWFer The Rock, this season’s contender taking a run in Schwarzenegger’s action-sandals. It’s amusing in the ways it’s supposed to be and kicks down with the well-paced big-dumb-fun action the way it should. Logic? Uh, never mind.

Last we saw the Scorpion King, he was an ancient CGI evil resurrected to threaten Brendan Fraser. Here, he’s not the Scorpion King yet, just some nice-guy mercenary sent to assassinate the sorceress of a bloodthirsty demagogue called Memnon, who is threatening to enslave the free world of 3000 BC (although, at that time, the free world was probably the size of Massachusetts, but still…). Seems that she gives the king hot tips on when are the good days to go overthrow other kings, who number only a handful at this juncture. So they hire The Rock to do the dirty work for them.

Unfortunately for The Rock, he takes one look at seeress Cassandra (Kelly Hu) and decides that for someone who has so much trouble keeping her scanties from exposing her naughty bits, she’s just too damned sexy to kill. So he moves to Plan B, which is to kill the king (which I thought would have been Plan A, but…). And that’s pretty much it, aside from copious amounts of sword swishing (no blood, though, just lots of icky sound effects of steel piercing flesh) and flesh (never the aforementioned naughty bits, although it seems that this ancient civilization had made a heretofore unthunk-of breakthrough in the uses of silicon), and a big explosion at the end. Dude.