Let's cut to the chase. This is a visual dumpster of ciches, predictability, stupid premises, and muddled, convoluted storytelling that clumsily attempts to unfold a narrative, but rather than unfolding, it oozes from several sores at once from the plot body. It's The Mummy meets Scooby Do In the Lair of the Deep-Throated Spider.
The Jia character, a Chinese female scientist who must have been the adopted grand-daughter of the Professor from Gilligan's Island, takes the trophy for annoying. Her non-stop dialogue consists of a series of all-knowing speeches and declarative statements like: "these spiders were trained to ....." She knows everything about everything about what the chinese mummy emperors thought, felt, did, you name it. She's the movie's deus ex machina via a writer's dialogue. Through her character, the writers just spit out factoids so we the audience have some clue what's supposed to be going on. Of course, the factoids don't make sense except in the rules of reality in the fake world the movie tries, and fails, to sell us.
One character's job is simple -- he just makes wise-cracks. Kellan Lutz provides almost all the action and stunts and of course, hunkiness. For the life of me I can't fathom why Kelsey Grammer signed onto this. His acting is solid -- considering his role is so....so....simplistic. They're underground most of the movie, yet their flashlights and phone lights seem to last forever. More annoyingly -- their underground caverns, which have no light source, frequently glow with inexplicable light from no source that makes sense. Without this fiction, the whole movie would look like one long boy scout ghost story inside the tent scene, where all we could see was what was in any given flashlight's overglare, about two feet wide at a time. No one would watch that. Just like no one should watch this.
