There should have been CGI gophers.

Those cute, digitally-generated creatures that provided a furry audience for the first of several unnecessary openers to the fourth "Indiana Jones" flick sadly didn't appear in Brendan Fraser's third "Mummy" effort, "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor."

Nor did anyone escape a nuclear explosion within a lead-lined refrigerator.

But they should have.

They would have fit in perfectly, because this CGI-mad flick could have been a brilliant, over-the-top spoof of everything "Indiana Jones."

Instead, Rob Cohen and company got cold feet halfway to shooting the moon.

The Indy reference wasn't obvious, but it was there. There was a diamond that pointed the way to Shangri-la reminiscent of the mechanism that pointed Indy to the Ark of the Covenant in "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Fraser's Rick O'Connell developed a mysterious affection for the fedora. And the temple where his son dug up the Dragon Emperor's terra cotta army came complete with all the death traps strangely absent from El Dorado in "Kindgom of the Crystal Skull."

The primary difference between O'Connell and Indiana Jones as characters is that Indy is actually a hero in the mythological sense. He confronts his internal demons. He faces his father. He rejects the call of absolute power.

O'Connell is just a normal guy stuck doing the hero shtick. Adventurer, yes. Hero, no.

And that works to a point.

The problem with this latest "Mummy" installment is that it seems to have forgotten effective parodies require nods and winks to the original material. It can't be so subtle that almost everyone who watches the movie misses it.

Fraser, Maria Bello et. al. should have been overacting their parts, much as the cast did in the first installment. In that film, Fraser was a gun-toting convict who barely escaped a hanging and Rachel Weisz (Bello's predecessor as Evie O'Connell) was a goody-good librarian who clumsily sent an entire room full of bookcases into a domino-like chain reaction of collapses.

If Indiana Jones would have raced back to retrieve his hat from under a closing wall, Fraser should have raced back to retrieve his hat while heaven and earth moved in a futile attempt to stop him and Bello yelled at him for risking his life for a stupid piece of clothing.

Instead, all the film includes is the hat, and then only for a few short seconds.

What summed up the film to me was the scene in which Brendan Fraser, who has been stabbed through the gut somewhere high in the Himalayas, is carried on a gurney by two CGI Yetis up to Shangri-la. Everyone else follows along in procession.

No one -- not even the comic relief -- makes a comment about how ridiculous it all is.

In other words, the filmmakers badly needed to nuke the fridge, but all they managed were a couple of fake-looking, helpful abominable snowmen.

I would have preferred the gophers.