The super-hit of the season, "The Dark Knight," received its PG-13 for what the MPAA terms "intense sequences of violence and some menace."
Universal's expensive would-be summer blockbuster, "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor," which opened Friday, has the following description in its PG-13 citation — "adventure action and violence."
What all of this means is that the big summer extravaganzas can suggest boatloads of violence, but have to cut away just as someone is being killed or maimed.
The new "Mummy" film often feels like an R-rated picture that has been trimmed for broadcast TV or an in-flight showing on one of the airlines. A fairly prominent character — a villainous tomb raider — appears to be decapitated in one especially intense action scene, but the editing is so choppy that it's hard to tell what is happening.
I still haven't heard a reasonable explanation for the key sequence in "The Dark Knight" in which Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) survives a catastrophic car crash that — apparently — kills the two villains with whom he is riding.
As the big summer movies become more action packed — more like the plot-less video games that routinely outgross popular films — the idea of a coherent narrative is vanishing. Sensation has replaced sense in the crazy storytelling of action films
The sheer wham-bam excitement of something like "The Mummy" or "The Dark Knight" seems to satisfy summer audiences to the point where they don't really care about small details such as: Did all those people die or did they just land somewhere off-screen and walk away?
I'm not suggesting that I would like to see all of the messy details in the mass carnage in Hollywood summer movies, but there is something a little sick about the huge numbers of "clean" kills in PG-13 productions.
Go to Joe Meyers' podcast at www.connpost.com/entertainment.
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