Dragon Emperor Mummy: Emperor Han Explained

The dragon emperor mummy is Han, the villain of the mummy tomb of the dragon emperor, played by Jet Li (billed sixth in the credits, behind Brendan Fraser, Maria Bello, John Hannah, Luke Ford and Isabella Leong Lok-Sze, and ahead of Michelle Yeoh). In the film he is a warlord who unified ancient China and then wanted to live forever, so he hired the sorceress Zi Yuan to help him.

The title can mislead, so it helps to place him. Han's curse turned him and his soldiers into a terracotta army, and the film belongs to the same saga as the mummy 1999 and the mummy returns. If you are searching for the creature from the first film, that is imhotep mummy, a different villain entirely.

Han is a fictional character, and the credits name him only as Han. The curse is a story device, and we report only what the filmmakers put on screen. For the other antagonists in the series, see the mummy villains.

Han's most important relationship is with Zi Yuan (Michelle Yeoh), the sorceress who both served him and cursed him. He hired her to help him live forever, and her love for his general Ming is what set the curse in motion. Ming Guo (Russell Wong) is the soldier Han had killed, and Ming later leads the army of old enemies that Zi Yuan raises against him.

On the living side, Han faces the O'Connell family. Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) is the retired adventurer whom Han wounds badly at Shangri-La. Evelyn is played here by Maria Bello, and her brother Jonathan Carnahan is played by John Hannah. Their son alex o'connell the mummy (Luke Ford) is the one who digs up the tomb and sets the story going. Lin (Isabella Leong Lok-Sze), who has her own link to the curse, is the young woman Han kidnaps.

Han also has human allies of convenience. General Yang (Anthony Wong Chau-sang) and Colonel Choi lead a rogue military faction that wants the emperor revived, and the archaeology professor works for them. It is an uneasy alliance, since Han kills the professor straight after waking. Rachel Weisz, who played Evelyn in the first two films, does not appear in this one.

In my opinion, Han's best scene is the one where he wakes, because it shows how the film wants its monster to work. The emperor is revived, kills the professor who helped dig him up and escapes, so a ruler cursed into clay two thousand years earlier is suddenly loose in 1946. That is a creature with rules, which is what I look for in a monster: the dagger is the thing that can stop him, and his army of clay answers to him.

The second moment I would pick is the Shangri-La stretch, when he drinks from the waters and comes back with a human form and more power. It is a clever escalation, because the same pool that heals Rick hands the villain a better version of himself. Perhaps the film could have given Jet Li more to do as a ruler, but the idea is a sound one.

The last is the clash between his army and Ming's forces, after he takes the dagger and heads back to his tomb to wake his soldiers and march on the Great Wall. Compared with Imhotep, who works through plagues and a personal love story, Han is a conqueror, and the finale lets him act like one. That being said, Imhotep remains the better villain for me, since his motive is simpler and the first film built him with more care.