A Marginal Take on The Scorpion King

(This was originally included with the review of "The Sum of All Fears" and was not intended to be a real review, but it is writing so I couldn't resist putting it up.)

There is no point in reviewing this film, since it's exactly what everyone else said it was (a big, special-effected, incoherent piece of crap intermittently redeemed by the charming Rock). Three things about the movie are worthy of note, however.

1) Kelly Hu as the sorceress Cassandra is... Wow. Kelly Hu. First of all, this woman wears almost no clothing through "The Scorpion King." Second, she looks better wearing almost no clothing than almost anyone else I've seen try that gambit. Third, she's 35 years old, an age where many women would be reluctant to try something like that, to say the least. Not that she has any reason to be afraid, but still. Fourth, she won Miss Teen USA...in 1985.

Hu's performance in this film makes you immediately want to look at (that being the operative verb) everything else she's been in. Unforunately, that appears to have primarily been "Nash Bridges" and "Martial Law." I am not sure that even Kelly Hu would make me want to watch those specific shows, so maybe she doesn't look all that good. Still, I plan to check out her performance in "Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan," as soon as I watch about 740 other movies I've been meaning to see.

Robert Kahn and I got into an interesting discussion on the way home from this one, addressing the philosophical question: "If Kelly Hu acts only in crap, and thus gives the same type of vapid (but still highly watchable) performance she gave in this film, is it still possible that she could act well given a decent environment in which to do it?" Robert feels that this is possible; I feel that any actress who would choose to repeatedly appear in films like this has to have something wrong with her thespianic lobe. Given Hu's current, astonishingly slow rate of deprettification, we may well be debating this topic again (with more evidence) in 25 years.

2) In this film, the evil white ruler enslaves a woman of Chinese, Hawaiian and English ancestry (Hu) to help him secure dominion over a bunch of swarthy people, but is eventually defeated by a man of Samoan ancestry (the Rock) and a "Nubian" tribe led by the enormous African-American Michael Clarke Duncan. The only white man on the side of good is the scientist. Having been in college for the last three years, this allocation of responsibility among races suggests certain things to me, and I'm going to assume they're just as obvious to you, cause I don't want to get too far into remembering what happens in this film.

3) While I wasn't looking, did someone create a new genre of "purposefully anachronistic historical action comedy"? "A Knight's Tale," "The Time Machine," and "The Scorpion King" all seem to be excellent examples, not to mention Martin Lawrence's "Black Knight," which I don't even have to see to know it's a seminal contribution to this genre. I can't say I'm sure that this genre is a good idea, as at least two of these films bit the biggest one they could find. (The fact that "The Scorpion King" is more enjoyable than "The Time Machine" is entirely due to the Rock's charmingness in place of Guy Pearce's vaguely lost look and Kelly Hu's above-mentioned virtues vs. Samantha Mumba's virtues, which though not inconsiderable are still much less worthy of mention.) I tremble at the thought of further examples of this genre being foisted upon an unprepared moviegoing public. On the other hand, I won't have to review them.

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