It is better to have lived and loved than not to have loved at all. Or is that not to have lived at all? Or not to have lived again? In any case, the latest mummy movie reveals the crazy lengths lovers will go for the sake of their love. The flick begins with a fancy flashback to Ancient Egypt where High Priest Imhotep is smitten with the Pharaoh's favorite scantily-clad concubine. Suspicious, the Pharaoh confronts his mistress, who has obviously just left a brief but forbidden tryst with the hot-to-trot high priest. Imhotep then kills the Pharaoh, but Pharaoh's beefy guards are in hot pursuit; so the mistress kills herself with the hope she'll be resurrected later by Imhotep (If only Juliet had such expectations.) I suppose only love justifies such foolery, for Pharaoh's guards also capture Imhotep, curse him to eternal misery, and bury him alive with flesh-eating beetles at Hamunaptra, the fabled Egyptian City of the Dead! Instant mummification!
Flash-forward three thousand years later to 1928 where Evelyn the bumbling librarian and soon to be love-interest (English actress Rachel Weisz) and her conniving brother Jonathon soon to be goofy sidekick (John Hannah) have enlisted the aid of former French Foreign Legion commander Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) to return to Hamunaptra in search of fabled Egyptian treasures. An American team of treasure plunderers are also on the hunt, and the race is on to be the first group to uncover the secrets buried in the ancient city.
Of course, our daring heroes and their expendable tagalongs uncover more than they expected in the form of Imhotep's skeletal remains brought drippingly back to life. The first thing the undead creature does is steal the tongue and eyes of his first unfortunate victim just in time to make a pass at the lovely heroine. Then, crazy lover that he is, Imhotep begins executing diabolical plans to kill the girl so he can resurrect the concubine he's been pining over for a seeming eternity. Quite predictably, Imhotep's power grows more and more out of control, curses abound, magic spells are invoked, Biblical plagues on Egypt are shortly revisited, and our heroes fight hordes of bandaged bad guys and creepy bugs before the world is saved from certain doom and all is set aright. Roll credits.
If that all sounds like an overly-ambitious routine horror film to you, that's not the half of it. Though the movie is surely intended to be a dazzling piece of Egyptian-themed eye candy, it lacks the focus to make it truly successful. The overall irreverent tone of the piece is surprisingly light-hearted for a would-be horror film. In fact, the whole movie wants to be more than it can be. It's not a parody, although at times it plays like one, and most of the jokes are dead on arrival. Nor is it horrific enough to be a fright-fest despite a few genuine spine-tingling moments. It's just too silly to be a plausible action film along the lines of the Indiana Jones films it seeks to emulate. The comparisons to Raiders of the Lost Ark and its sequels are obvious from the misleading previews, but these characters are just too nonchalant and unaffected in spite of the, uh, grave dangers facing them.
Despite an utterly predictable plot and some unnecessarily slow moments, the performances of two actors stand out. Rachel Weisz as the adventure-seeking librarian doesn't have too much to do in the movie, but she manages her bits with both surprising charm and fumbling grace. Her presence and winsome smile are enough. John Hannah as her brother turns in another successfully wisecracking performance similar in tone to the role he played in Sliding Doors. He delivers all the best laugh lines for good reason: he has a genuinely jocular disposition with good timing. In contrast, Arnold Vosloo as Imhotep is reduced to evil grins and Egyptian mumbo-jumbo. Worse, Brendan Fraser takes a few tips from the Keanu Reeves Class for Acting Underachievers to turn in a George of the Jungle-visiting- the-pyramids performance. The fault for this lies as much in the scattered direction as it does in Fraser's otherwise tested talents. At the very least, Fraser looks the part of the dashing hero, and his many action sequences annihilating the undead are entertaining bits of derring-do.
The opening matte-sequences of Ancient Egypt are stimulating as are the shots of twentieth century Cairo and the plagues that beset it. The special effects create sentient skeletons, sandstorms, and Scarab beetle hordes galore as well as fiery hail bombardments and a flurry of hungry locusts. Although certainly more visually stimulating than any of the preceding mummy movies, the visual elements were disappointing at times by current standards. Today's spoiled audiences will not be as wowed by these displays of computer gimmickry largely for two reasons: many of the effects have been done before in other movies, and, secondly, not all of the effects were rendered as well as they could be. For example, when Imhotep originally busies himself with his vicious organ donor assimilation, his computer-generated appearance is on the fake side. Despite the wanting quality of some of these effects, the sheer quantity of them will hold your attention.
Director and writer, Stephen Sommers--most recently of Deep Rising
infamy--apparently wanted a movie to be all things to all people. Borrowing
heavily from the plots of the two Ghostbuster's films as well as
some passing resemblance to the original 1932 Karl Freund film featuring
Boris Karloff in the title role, The Mummy attempts to be a creepy
action comedy with a mummy motif along the lines of the dark cult film
Army of Darkness. Even with the near absence of sex, nudity and
vulgarity, some of the gooey bad guys and violence sequences disqualify
this as acceptable family fun, although the director gets points for trying.
Regardless, the movie is a somewhat entertaining diversion if you don't
mind the neatly wrapped-up Hollywood presentation. Unfortunately, if it
had gone further in any one specific direction, the audience could have
had more than this ectoplasmic
mess truly in need of bandaging.
Steven Stuart Baldwin (5/14/99)
