Although Mummy series director Stephen Sommers writes and produces The Scorpion King, the director’s chair has been turned over to Chuck Russell. Chuck Russell has previously made the likes of A Nightmare on Elm Street III: The Dream Warriors (1987), the remake of The Blob (1988), the Jim Carrey superhero film The Mask (1994), the Arnold Schwarzenegger action film Eraser (1996) and the occult flop Bless the Child (2000). While none of Chuck Russell’s films are particularly standout, common to all of these is Russell’s interest in state of the art special effects, so it is no particular surprise that he has been asked to step into Sommers’ shoes for The Scorpion King, considering how the Mummy films were almost entirely driven by special effects.

The surprise with The Scorpion King is that, unlike the Mummy films and considering Chuck Russell’s penchant for effects, the film is rarely driven by effects set-pieces. In fact, outside of the sorceress, there’s very little about The Scorpion King that is fantasy at all. While clearly effects have been used to create cities, armies and swarms of scorpions, here they are employed in the service of enhancement instead of the gratuitous wonderment they are in the Mummy films. Rather the set-pieces that Russell creates are centered around the inherently non-fantastical stuff of sword battles, chases through the palace, stalkings in gloomy caverns, armies on the attack and so on. And as such Chuck Russell is actually a better a director than Stephen Sommers in either Mummy film – The Scorpion King doesn’t come infected with the campy unserious silliness that underlies all of Sommers’ action set-pieces, nor the perpetual straining to bombard the audience with CGI amazement. While The Scorpion King never plays much above the level of an action movie cartoon, Russell at least takes it relatively seriously.

Certainly, The Scorpion King is never more than a mediocre film. While Chuck Russell sets the action up with competence, there’s not much a plot holding it together. It stirs a few sword and sorcery cliches, but the average Italian Conan the Barbarian (1982) ripoff does these much more energetically. Most irritatingly, the plot skips over the title. There’s a brief scene where The Rock is stabbed with an arrow dipped in scorpion venom, but outside of that there’s no explanation of how he ended up as the scorpion hybrid we saw in The Mummy Returns. Of course the dictates of movie heroism require that the film end on an upbeat note and so rather than seeing him turned into a scorpion creature the show ends with him killing the villain, winning the girl and inheriting the kingdom. In terms of the promised origin story of the Scorpion King, the film is a complete cheat.

The Rock makes for a likeable hero – he certainly has more natural charisma than Arnold Schwarzenegger did in either of his Conan outings. But the role is extremely one-dimensional – The Rock is never required to do more than narrow his eyes in grim determination or occasionally smile and give his trademark quizzically curled eyebrow. Among the rest of the cast, Kelly Hu is beautiful but vapid. British actor Steven Brand projects a strong tightly bound presence as the villain of the show. Grant Heslov gives a performance that is like a bad racial caricature of an Indian.

The Scorpion King: Rise of a Warrior (2008) was a dvd-released prequel where The Rock was replaced by Michael Copon. Chuck Russell has subsequently announced a return to similar territory with the big screen version of Arabian Nights (2011).