Brendan Fraser returns to hunt the undead in The

Three Mummy movies worth of cheese and not one of them is set in Wisconsin. Do America’s dairy farmers know about this?

And in “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor,” that cheese has curdled into the dumbest, most violent Mummy yet.

The big screen test this summer was always going to be “Will the film series evermore known as ‘Indy-lite’ hold up when compared, directly, to a revived Indiana Jones?” The answer is “Not bloody likely,” with an emphasis on “bloody.”

Director Rob Cohen follows his last fiasco, “Stealth,” with this tale, which picks up those tomb-violating O’Connells, Rick and Evelyn, and their now-adult son, Alex, a dozen years after the last adventure. “Retired” in style in Jolly Olde, they’re summoned to post-war China on a pretext. They get mixed up with their tomb-pilfering son’s prize find, a cursed evil ancient emperor and his terra cotta army, whom one Chinese faction wants to revive so that “order” can be restored to the land.

Brendan “Forelocks” Fraser is back as Rick, pistol-packing pilferer and mummy hunter. He’s here to yell “Here we go again!” and “I HATE mummies!” a few times, and in the middle of a fantastical fight with all manner of supernatural soldiers surrounding them, sputter, “Next time I say we’ve been in tougher spots than this? I mean this.”

In a stunt that works but doesn’t quite pay off, the terrific Maria Bello replaces Oscar winner Rachel Weisz as “Evie,” an impersonation that is spot on but rather misses the point. It’s one thing for the tiny English rose Weisz to kick tail. It’s not as funny when the earthy, sexy, two-fisted Bello does.

Luke Ford, a young actor who is, like Fraser, sans charisma, was cast as their son. John Hannah returns as comic relief.

The theme park ride we have to call “plot” tacks on every Chinese martial-arts epic “mystery” and “curse” that’s ever been used, and tosses in everything from Shangri-La to the Yeti to complete this “One from column A, one from column B” take-out order.

Martial arts star Jet Li, as the emperor, spends much of the movie acting (an effect) through terra cotta – an improvement in his case. Michelle Yeoh is the witch who put the original curse on the emperor, and Isabella Leong is the guardian who tries to keep the evil one from rising from the dead, suppressing freedom and invading Tibet.

Whoopsie.

The action beats are the same as the earlier Mummys – with planes, guns, digital creatures and vast armies of the risen-dead having at it. The missing ingredient here seems to be the fun. All those anachronisms, the French Foreign Legion bravado of Rick, the wacky reactions to each new amazing undead thing, didn’t matter when the tone was lighter. “Tomb” has too high a body count to manage that.

Perhaps the only consolation in all this is how irked China will be. They grant filming privileges, let the producers shoot in some gorgeous mountain, desert and Great Wall locations, and what they get is a mess in which Chinese are slaughtered and saved from evil by a well-armed American and a few trigger-happy Brits. That’ll teach ’em.