Last night as an installment of our annual summer Bad Movie Night tradition, 112 minutes of the precious little time I have on this Earth was futilely squandered at a screening of "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor" -- what could very well be the worst big-budget motion picture I have ever seen.

Top billing is given to Brendan Fraser and Jet Li, even though the latter is in the movie for about 5 minutes before being replaced with CGI effects and remaining that way until about the last 10 minutes of the movie.

This is a film that is just godawful in so many ways that to cover them all would take longer that it takes to actually watch the movie. So I'll highlight just a few.

For reasons that are inexplicable except perhaps to ride on the coattails of this summer's other disaster of a sequel, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Rick O'Connell (Brendan Frasier) and his new wife (now played by Maria Bello) are now retirees. Though you'd never guess from the makeup, which never succeeds and making them look any older than their late thirties. Their son Alex (Luke Ford) is a full-grown man now who looks so close to his parents in age that they must have conceived him when they were about 12 years old.

While Alex is in China digging up a mummy, his parents are charged with couriering an ancient artifact back to a Chinese museum. Little do any of them realize that their actions have been carefully orchestrated by the evil General Yang (Anthony Wong Chau-Sang), who intends to use the artifact to resurrect the mummy. "It was I who made the arrangements for it to be you two who brought me the artifact," a grinning Yang tells the O'Connells as he takes possession of the shiny jewel that contains water-of-life from Shangri-La.

Now, I don't know about you, but if I were wanting to resurrect an evil ancient mummy, the pair of people with a well established history of thwarting resurrected mummies would be the last people I would use as couriers. Any chump with a plane ticket and a carry-on bag could have done the job with no risk to my evil plans.

Of course the mummy does indeed come to life, and eventually the action moves to a mountain temple in the Himalayas. A battle ensues, and the mummy wins because he has mastery over the 5 elements: water, fire, earth, wind, and... metal. (Sorry, Leeloo, guess you were wrong about the Fifth Element.) After the battle it is a race between the good guys and the bad guys to the top of a nearby mountain. Somehow the good guys and 3 yeti, burdened with carrying a nearly-dead injured person, reach the top of the mountain before the magical-power possessing mummy.

Atop the mountain they find Shangri-La, Michelle Yeoh, and the pool of eternal life. This pool is what the mummy is seeking, as he needs its waters to break free of the curse that causes him to keep turning into pottery. So several hours after the badly beaten good guys arrived, the victorious mummy finally shows up. And what's the first thing he does? Shoots a fireball directly at the pool of eternal life.... the very thing that is the most important to him! "He's back to full power!" Evelyn exclaims, with absolutely nothing on which to base that determination.

The mummy hops in for a swim, and perhaps we will finally see Jet Li, right? Nope... now he turns into a 3-headed dragon, kidnap's Alex's girlfriend, and flies back to his original tomb. Our heroes hop into a plane and do the same,

The action moves to the desert, near a ruined section of the Great Wall of China, where the mummy's original tomb was. Jet Li appears finally, briefly (before turning into a troglodyte for a while), and resurrects his army comprised of thousands of soldiers who are also made of walking flowerpots. To achieve immortality and invincibility, they must cross to the opposite side of the Great Wall. Thankfully Michelle Yeoh summons up an army of inept skeletons to slow their progress..

This begs a very important question: Who buried the mummy and his army, and what was their motivation? If it was someone evil, why would they not have simply buried the army on the other side of the wall so that they would already be immortal if they were ever awakened? If the burier was someone good who wanted to ensure this army would never rise again, then why bury them right next to the wall that gives them immortality? Why not bury them a thousand miles away? Or, better yet, smash them to bits?

Well, I won't ruin any more of the movie by telling you whether the mummy wins or whether Brendan Frasier wins. But the movie does end with an important historical fact about Peru.

To me, the only entertaining experience about this movie was the two rows of teenagers behind us who seemed to think this movie was somehow good. The laughed frequently at the "witty" comedy and cowered in terror at the "scary" molten-bronze horsies.

Hopefully this installment will finally kill the mummy franchise, and we can bury it, and hope that no one ever digs it up again, not even thousands of years from now.