The Mummy Review
by "David N. Butterworth" (dnb AT dca DOT net)May 16th, 1999
THE MUMMY
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 1999 David N. Butterworth
** (out of ****)
Do you remember that scene towards the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," when the Nazi's jimmy open the Ark of the Covenant and those screaming, smoke-like furies emerge, melting the bad guys' flesh right off the bone and leaving large puddles of goo on the floor?
Well, that's pretty much the tone of "The Mummy," a just-in-time-for-Mother's-Day update of one of those old Universal horror films of the '30s in which a dusty old geezer in bandages staggered around scaring the bejeebers out of well-meaning archeologists and late-night TV watchers like you and me.
1999's "The Mummy," which stars Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, and a tombful of special effects, falls somewhere between "Romancing the Stone" and "From Dusk Till Dawn," a far cry from the original series of films about an embalmed Egyptian looking to reincarnate his lost love.
Let's just say that the unintentional humor in the Boris Karloff version was a lot funnier than the intentional stuff here.
As if the tongue-in-cheek approach isn't trying enough, the 134-minute film eventually wears you down with its non-stop assault on the senses once high priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo, the only person playing it straight in the movie) is reawakened some 3,000 years after being buried alive for getting it on with his pharaoh's mistress. With only a bucketful of flesh-eating scarab beetles for company, no wonder he's in a bad mood!
Those responsible for Imhotep's reemergence are an unlikely bunch of 1920's gravediggers made up of a charmless librarian (Weisz), her unctuous brother, and a death-row legionnaire called Rick O'Connell who claims to know the location of the treasure-laden City of the Dead. For a brief spell they're joined by a corrupt prison official who agrees to free O'Connell for an appreciable percentage of the spoils, but he makes the mistake of complaining about hating bugs...
Bugs are to "The Mummy" what snakes were to "Raiders."
The longer the film goes on, the more the chills give way to slapstick. Since there's so much silliness to contend with, you can't help but chuckle every now and again. John Hannah (as the brother) serves up some decent laughs, but it's Fraser who seems to be having the most fun with his role of O'Connell, even if his character seems closer to George of the Jungle than Indiana Jones. Weisz's character is pretty lifeless so it's just as well that her relationship with O'Connell takes a back seat to all that mummy-busting dering-do.
If you go in expecting "The Mummy" to be a straitlaced adventure flick or even a horror film, you'll be disappointed. But if you anticipate a dopey "Raiders" wannabe with some occasional scares, numerous gross-out scenes, and enough special effects and inane attempts at humor to overload three movies, you'll probably enjoy it a whole lot more.
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David N. Butterworth
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Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
