THE MUMMY
USA. 1999. Director/Screenplay - Stephen Sommers, Story - Sommers, Lloyd Fonvielle & Kevin Jarre, Producer - Sean Daniel & James Jacks, Photography - Adrian Biddle, Music - Jerry Goldsmith, Visual Effects Supervisor - John Andrew Berton Jr, Visual Effects - Industrial Light and Magic, Additional Visual Effects - Cinesite & Pacific Mirage Title, Thebes and Hamunaptra Sequence Supervisor - Scott Farrar, Special Effects Supervisor - Chris Corbould, Production Design - Allan Cameron. Production Company - Alphaville. Brendan Fraser (Rick O'Connell), Rachel Weisz (Evelyn Carnovan), John Hannah (Jonathan Carnovan), Arnold Vosloo (Imhotep), Kevin J. O'Connor (Beni), Omid Djalili (The Warden), Jonathan Hyde (The Egyptologist), Erick Avari (The Curator), Stephen Dunham (Henderson), Corey Johnson (Daniels), Tuc Watkins (Burns), Oded Fehr (Ardeth Bey), Bernard Fox (Winston Havelock), Patricia Velazquez (Anck-su-namun)
Plot: In 1290 B.C. the Egyptian high priest Imhotep is sentened to a death too horrible to be described for daring to seduce the Pharaoh's mistress Anck-su-namun. In 1926 Evelyn Carnovan, a librarian at the Cairo Museum of Antiquities, comes across a map leading to Hamunaptra, the forbidden Ancient Egyptian city of the dead. Rescuing adventurer Rick O'Connell who promises to lead her there from the hangman's noose, she sets forth on an expedition to find Hamunaptra, although they find themselves in a race against a rival American expedition. But the attempts of both parties to be the first to discover the lost city end up reviving the mummified remains of Imhotep. Imhotep needs the human organs of a number of victims in order to regenerate and unleashes the twelve Biblical plagues as he attempts to claim the necessary victims, incarnate his beloved Anck-su-namun in the body of Evelyn and unleash a blight of evil across the Earth.
The mummy film is maybe one subgenre more than any other that is condemned to B programmer status simply by its theme. The 1932 Boris Karloff ‘The Mummy' was a genre classic which, albeit cast a little too much in the shadow of the 1931 Bela Lugosi ‘Dracula', was given enormous eerie atmosphere by director Karl Freund. But the subsequent mummy sequels produced by Universal - ‘The Mummy's Hand' (1940), ‘The Mummy's Tomb' (1942), ‘The Mummy's Ghost' (1944) and ‘The Mummy's Curse' (1944) - turned the title character into a clumsy bandaged-wrapped zombie wholly lacking in threat, before reaching the ignoble nadir of ‘Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy' (1955). England's Hammer Studios remade ‘The Mummy' in 1959, along with a package of other classic Universal horror films. There the character was effectively fed through the dynamic polarization of Victorian reason versus animal passion that the early Hammer films effectively represented. But alas subsequent Hammer mummy films - ‘Curse of the Mummy's Tomb' (1964) and ‘The Mummy's Shroud' (1967), with the arguable exception of ‘Blood from the Mummy's Tomb' (1971) - failed to escape the B programmer curse. And outside of the English-speaking world, the mummy's career path was well and truly on a long downward spiral, most notably being pitted in the ring in Mexico's ‘Wrestling Women vs the Aztec Mummy' (1964) and Santo vs the Mummy (19) , while Spain offered gore-drenched efforts like ‘Vengeance of the Mummy' (1972) and ‘Dawn of the Mummy' (1981). It can almost be said that the most effective mummy films are those that escape B programmer status by virtue of subsuming themselves into some other type of genre. The only other halfway effective mummy film has been the underrated ‘The Awakening' (1980) which dropped all bandaged-wrapped terrors and created an often subtle story about possession while modelling itself on the supernatural killings set-pieces of ‘The Omen'. (It was also the first mummy film in fifty years to actually shoot on location in Egypt).
The latest remake of ‘The Mummy' endeavours to abandon most connections to the mummy B movie and happily conflates the genre into a high adventure film a la the Indiana Jones series. If the 1932 version of ‘The Mummy' was born out of the emergent romantic horror film created by Universal's ‘Dracula' and the 1959 ‘Mummy' was pitted in the British fight with morality and society over animal instinct, then the 1999 ‘Mummy' is born out of the modern action-adventure spectacle and the CGI creature movie post-‘Jurassic Park'. This ‘Mummy' quickly abandons any connection with the shuffling bandage-enwrapped creatures of yore and the new mummy becomes a much more dynamic figure whose abilities are writ on an epic canvas - it talks, it is a black sorcerer who transforms into flurries of sand, blasts sandstorms out of its mouth, raises armies of the undead and animated scarab beetles, while wielding the Biblical Plagues of Egypt (which have in a complete about-face been placed in the service of a great Egyptian force of evil rather than in the service of the Almighty wishing to free a slave race from the Egyptian yolk).
The ‘Mummy' remake has been an oft-mentioned go-project for most of the 1990s under directors such as Mick Garris and Clive Barker. Indeed when Anthony Perkins died in 1992 he was in the midst of shooting a subsequently abandoned remake. The director finally settled on, Stephen Sommers, debuted with the teen comedy ‘Catch Me If You Can' (1989) and followed with the acclaimed 1993 ‘The Adventures of Huck Finn' before making the underrated 1994 live-action remake of ‘The Jungle Book' which, although it bore more in common with Edgar Rice Burroughs than Rudyard Kipling, had a beautiful sense of epic jungle adventure to it. However Sommers disappointed with 1998's ‘Alien'-at-sea clone, ‘Deep Rising'.
Sommers though has a talent for crafting epic adventure. In ‘The Jungle Book' Sommers created an adventure-movie version of India that was more fabulous and more mysterious than the real India could ever hope to be and in ‘The Mummy' similarly creates a more fabulous and mysterious than the real Egypt adventure movie version of Egypt. The film is filled with incredible vistas of sandstorms, lost cities seen both in the fabulousness of their heyday and the spleandour of their ruins, treasure chambers, booby-trapped tombs. No sky ever seems merely blue but boils with coloured clouds and larger-than-real-life CGI moons. And Sommers has an ability to direct satisfyingly kinetic action set-pieces - shootouts with hordes of charging horsebound Bedouins, fights aboard burning ships, adventurers attempting to combat mummies with machine-guns and swords, biplanes racing against giant face-shaped sandstorms and a full-tilt ‘Evil Dead'-styled climatic set-piece up against zombified mummy priests.
But for all that Sommers' film crumbles into a lightweight popcorn munch without substance whose taste is immediately forgotten when one leaves the theatre. When one looks at it, it stirs no more and no less than the sum of the elements that ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark' assembled, yet ‘Raiders' became an instant classic while ‘The Mummy' falls well short of such stature and will probably barely even be remembered by the end of the summer. The difference is more akin to that between ‘Raiders' and ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade' - where, by the time of the third of the Indiana Jones film, the sheer panache and kinetic inventivity of the first film had become ham-fisted slapstickery. Sommers great failing here is to play far too much towards common denominator audience-pleasing humour. The two leads make flip quips the whole way through and what few moments of horror there are drowned out by ‘Army of Darkness'-styled gags with skeletons playing football with their heads, with Weisz accidentally knocking down a domino line of library shelves and the like. Sommers is working with a one-dimensional script and a less-than-serious attitude toward it by he and the principals is something that causes the film's suspension of disbelief to fold at the knees.
Neither do the leads work. Brendan Fraser comes with too much baggage as casting as an amiable lunkead in comedies like ‘Encino Man' (1992), ‘Airheads' (1994), ‘George of the Jungle' (1997) and ‘Blast from the Past' (1999). There is no depth to his character at all - we, for instance, never learn what he, an American, is doing adventuring in Egypt in the first place. A handsome stalwart leading man type such as Harrison Ford or Tom Selleck would have carried this part in their sleep but Fraser's goofy eye-rollings strip the character of any heroic stature. Similarly Rachel Weisz plays the fruity British accent up but, as always, she gives an awful performance and is not at all believable as a period woman. Arnold Vosloo has a certain sinister presence as the title character while John Hannah makes for irritating comic relief. But again the less-than-single-dimensionality of the writing makes the parts seem even slighter. Even more unforgivably most of the Arabic characters in the film seem written as comic foil racial caricatures where anybody of Arabic persuasion is portrayed as craven, greedy and stupid.
Eventually the film's persistent spectacle and sheer dynamism carries it to a certain level of likability, albeit entirely forgettable likability. You can't deny that Sommers directs action well, but neither can you deny that the miscast leads and a far too broad audience-pleasing sense of humour entirely deflates it as a film. Its lack of belief in its own seriousness is the dividing line between a forgettable popcorn film and what could have had the makings of a classic.
Reviewed by Richard Scheib
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