C+ | An ancient Egyptian with a powerful curse is awoken by an American swashbuckler and an English librarian. Directed by Stephen Sommers Starring Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, and Arnold Vosloo Review by Jon Kissel |
Shooting at the scarabs and punching the juicy corpses is Brendan Fraser’s Rick O’Connell, an action hero patterned off of in-the-field Indiana Jones. The lecturer part of Indy is embodied by Evelyn Carnahan, an enthusiastic egyptologist. As the film’s romantic pairing, Sommers throws back to the screwball comedies of the era The Mummy is set. Their rapport isn’t rapid-fire, but it works as a respect for what the other does. Rick falls in love with Evelyn the moment he sees how competent she is on a camel. Dividing the film amongst the two protagonists prevents either from having to take on absurd abilities as the plot reaches its climax. She doesn’t suddenly become a sharpshooter and he doesn’t learn how to read hieroglyphics. Both actors acquit themselves well, with Fraser’s to-the-camera roars being the most memorable screengrab and embodying the character’s playful fearlessness, while Weisz’ triumphant read of ‘librarian’ during a drunken campfire scene is a charm bomb.
The rest of the cast complements Fraser and Weisz on the action and comedy fronts. Short-lived hanger-on Warden Hassan (Omid Djalili) steals every second he’s on screen. Competing greedy sidekicks Jonathan (John Hannah) and Beni (Kevin J O’Connor) keep searching for the bottom, with Beni the clear cockroach winner between the two. His whipping out of various religious medallions to combat Imhotep is a great character moment, as is the horror of his inevitable comeuppance. The rival American team provide Sommers with plenty of opportunity for horror movie victims, and make an impression insomuch as they believe themselves to be the leads in their own movie, albeit a worse, straight to cable one. Lastly, Oded Fehr is another actor who made his career with The Mummy, a guy who looks great swinging a scimitar but earns his place here with his childlike joy hanging off the wing of an airplane.
The Mummy is prevented from higher pinnacles of greatness by the deep mediocrity of Sommers. He’s as close as he ever gets in what’s otherwise his best movie, but his sloppiness and lack of deeper imagination is still present. The script by him, Lloyd Fonvielle, and Kevin Jarre allows for the possibility of a softer antagonist. Imhotep’s in love with a woman who describes herself as a slave to the pharoah, an absolute monarch who, like all absolute monarchs, gets what’s coming to him. The ritual to resurrect Anck-su-namun is just a spell, at least in the prologue, while Oded Fehr’s ancestors are the ones who kill all of Imhotep’s priests in extreme fashion and put a curse on Imhotep himself. World domination isn’t part of Imhotep’s plan in the prologue, but it might as well be in the present. Marvel does this kind of thing with varying effectiveness, where the villain’s motivations are understandable but their methods are not. There’s none of that shading here, and the film’s worse for it. Would, perhaps, Imhotep have any thoughts about foreign treasure hunters coming to his homeland to pillage the graves of his countrymen? The film doesn’t care about that either, wrapping extras in cloaks that might as well be red shirts. The shorthand nature of the script extends to some of the action, where laziness is what marks Sommers as a director-for-hire. Some sequences are coherent and kinetic, and sometimes the pharoah’s bodyguards just show up with no preamble to interrupt Imhotep’s rituals. The final fight is particularly clumsy in this regard, as Imhotep is just watching things happen despite being the most powerful person in the room. Hacks throw their hands up and stop trying to find solutions to problems, and though The Mummy has many assets, they’re being corralled and directed by a hack.
The Mummy remains a watchable and entertaining relic of its era, when blockbusters felt no need to be about anything other than a good time at the theater. Comparable films today have gotten more thoughtful or more complicated, if not necessarily better. The Mummy is about as good as it gets for turn-your-brain-off filmmaking. B