Not that you'd notice it. Sommers uses the computer-generated effects and camera as if they were spackling globbed on to plug up the holes. The effects that were almost tossed away in the first movie -- like the face of Im-Ho-Tep appearing in a sandstorm -- are repeated and lingered on here. When his face appears in a wall of water rushing through a mountain pass we seem to be looking at it forever. It's like sitting through one of those slide shows where the presenter keeps asking if the people in back can see when everyone is dying for him to get on with it. (And the jump scenes arrive so predictably that you could use their timing to boil eggs.)

There are some nice effects -- a troop of pygmy skeletons who pull their victims down into the jungle grass so it looks as if they just fell through a hole in the earth. And there's a nice bit with mummy soldiers giving chase to Fraser, who's on the open top of a double-decker, by skittering along the sides of buildings lining the London streets.

But Sommers has succumbed to the relentless camera movement and frantic editing that reduce most action and adventure movies to visual gibberish. It's no match for the gibberish in the script. You keep waiting for the movie to find the right bantering tone. It's not just that it never stops throwing plot and effects at us (which backfires, making the movie seem much longer than its two hours), it's that all the dialogue scenes are flabby buildup to verbal toppers that never come. Sommers even blows the final clinch line between Weisz and Fraser after providing himself with the perfect setup.

Fraser (who, in the first movie, turned out to be a nice, self-effacing, laid-back choice for an adventure hero) and Weisz look like they get on smashingly. But we're as left out of this love match as their kid is because they haven't been given the sparring, sexy dialogue to draw us in. The first movie's ace in the hole, John Hannah as Weisz's gambling and womanizing brother, is trashed here, too. With that thin build and the dry irony of his pip-pip manner, Hannah suggests one of Bertie Wooster's more dissolute acquaintances. I don't think he missed one laugh in any of his lines in the first movie. Finding the laughs in the dialogue he's been given here would require its own expedition. I kept looking at Hannah, hanging around with nothing to do, and his bland little nephew and wondering why both problems couldn't be solved with one stroke.

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Hannah could have been profitably employed, and the tyke given some personality, if the little beggar had been taught how to drink, or at least how to play a few hands of rummy. Dissolution isn't just something you learn overnight, you know.

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