Is Jet Li implying The Mummy 3 has a certain recycled feel to it?

Reading Time:1 minute

Published: 12:00am, 31 Oct 2007

The shoot for The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, with local heroes Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh Choo-kheng and Isabella Leong Lok-sze plus star Brendan Fraser, has moved to the mainland. The US$150 million production supposedly has about 1,500 people working on it at the moment, so it's literally a cast of thousands. Li plays a nasty reincarnated emperor mummy trying to raise his army of 5,000 terracotta warriors to life.

The ever-keen Asian cinema bloggers at Kaiju Shakedown have been closely following the production, including sifting through the personal blogs of Li and director Rob Cohen.

Their latest revelation is to contrast the comments of the director and his star villain.

'I shot Jet Li on his black stallion [right] riding into battle in his jade armour,' Cohen wrote on robcohenthemummy.com.

'He looked nothing short of an emperor. He has been totally professional and warm to me and the entire crew, like the prince he truly is.'

Li's take on the adventure sequel, however, seems a bit more ambiguous. He wrote on www.jetli.com: 'As I sit here, reading the Chinese/English script, I have a sense of deja vu ... In my May 4 blog entry, I mentioned a similar experience while reading the script for The Forbidden Kingdom [his Hollywood film with Jackie Chan] ... In the end, making movies is my job, so I won't let the audience down.'

Select Voice

Choose your listening speed

Get through articles 2x faster

1.25x

250 WPM

Slow

Average

Fast

00:0000:00

1.25x