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Il y a bien longtemps dans l’Egypte ancienne, Memnon (Steven Brand), un guerrier assoiffé de pouvoir, fut propulsé à la tête de l’Empire grâce à ses talents de combattant et aux dons puissants de la sorcière Cassandra (Kelly Hu) qui l’accompagnait. Lasses de ce roi sanguinaire, les tribus opprimées engagèrent pour l’abattre un assassin répondant au nom de Mathayus (The Rock)…
In an ancient time, predating the pyramids, the evil king Memnon is using the psychic powers of his sorceress Cassandra to fortell his great victories. In a last ditch effort to stop Memnon from taking over the world, the leaders of the remaining free tribes hire the assassin Mathayus to kill the sorceress. But Mathayus ends up getting much more than he bargained for. Now with the help of the trixter Arpid, tribal leader Balthazar and an unexpected ally, it's up to Mathayus to fufill his destiny and become the great Scorpion King. |
Front and Back DVD cover of the Film: THE SCORPION KING, The Rock
Most of the anachronisms are fine by me. Catapults, crossbows, gunpowder, telescopes - I understand it's all part of the fantasy; I know that all these things, modern though some of them are, have an Olde Worlde flavour that sits reasonably well with the swords and sorcery and clay bricks and visions and jewels and so forth. But I draw the line at breast implants. Really! I don't think there was a genuine pair of boobs in the whole movie. Believe me, I looked: we never see much of Kelly Hu (even when she's naked), so I'll admit the jury's out in her case, but I did get a decent squiz at half a dozen courtesans, another half-dozen street prostitutes and the odd female warrior, and without exception they not only have painfully unconvincing breasts, but painfully unconvincing EVERYTHING. Their very skin seems to be made of plastic. How is this possible? Even in California, there must be some young actresses left who at least LOOK as though they have real flesh. ...Yes, it's a bad movie, made worse by the fact that there's real promise buried beneath the layers of badness, just as there's promise in ANY unfettered fantasy of simple heroism in the Ancient World. (I kind of wish the Mummy movies had been set entirely in Ancient Egypt, without the 20th Century intruding, just as I wish the 20th Century hadn't intruded on "The Scorpion King" by means of breast implants.) But if you deny the badness you simply don't have eyes and ears. The dialogue is among the most unspeakably atrocious I've encountered - that is, in a film for which someone was actually PAID to write the script. I can't be the first person to have complained about "As long as we live and breathe, the Sorcerer shall die," a sentence which is about as sensible as "Until I pay off my mortgage, Verdi was born on a Wednesday." Not all dialogue is unspeakable because it makes no sense, but it's all unspeakable for some reason. And what's with that electric ghee-tar music that accompanies half the action scenes? It's as if someone was deeply confused by the fact that the actor playing the hero is, in real life, a professional wrestler. What if he'd been a ship hand? Would they have played a hornpipe?
There's nothing original in The Scorpion King, but this derivative action franchise gets off to a rousing start by cleverly stealing from a lot of better movies. Capitalizing on his brief cameo in The Mummy Returns, Dwayne Johnson (a.k.a. World Wrestling Federation star the Rock) stars as Mathayus, an Akkadian assassin in the age preceding Egyptian pharaohs, who vows to avenge his brother's murder by an undefeated warlord (Steven Brand) prophesied to become the desert-ruling Scorpion King. Their battle for supremacy comprises most of the film's brisk 95-minute running time, punctuated by comic relief from Mathayus's obligatory sidekick (Grant Heslov), romance with a beautiful sorceress (Kelly Hu), and alliance with a massive Nubian (Michael Clarke Duncan) on the eve of their climactic showdown. There's no rhyme or reason to the film's depiction of ancient civilization (the costuming is particularly ludicrous), but the Rock demonstrates adequate action-star potential, and director Chuck Russell (The Mask) wraps it all in a slick, professional package Cast of the movie: THE SCORPION KING, The Rock
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