Review of The Mummy (1999) by Baurushan J — 05 Feb 2012

Shallow Fun, Which Is Better Than Most of His Movies.

I like Brendan Fraser, but I'm not always entirely sure why. After all, I am not often inclined to like Brendan Fraser movies. One or two of them are really excellent, and most of them are frankly terrible. This is a franchise which went downhill fast, and unfortunately it made everyone think he needed to be a sort of wholesome, all-American action hero, despite the fact that he is also capable of, you know, acting. He is also getting a bit on in years for it. Okay, yes, he's younger than Harrison Ford, but Harrison Ford is a special case. It is also true that I'm not entirely clear on why the last sequel to this gave his character a college-age son. Yes, he's old enough to have one, being eight years older than I. But only just barely, and there's the obvious problem that the movies were released less than ten years apart. Of course, they have a ten-year-old in the second movie, which was made only two years later.

Fraser is Rick O'Connell, an American in Egypt. Through a pure fluke, he discovers the location to the lost city of Hamunaptra. Through an even less likely fluke, the man who picks his pocket and steals the map and key to the city is Jon Carnahan (John Hannah), son of a great explorer and brother of an Egyptologist, Evelyn (Rachel Weisz). Rick is being hanged for it doesn't matter, and they save him so that he can lead them to the city. Which he really doesn't want to, but it's better than being hanged. Probably. Only the city is the secret resting place of the High Priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo), who was buried alive in a sarcophagus full of scarabs because he dared to love Anck Su Namun (Patricia Velasquez). Through a series of further flukes, Imhotep is raised from the dead, and he's going to destroy the world. Oh, and kill Evy to raise Anck Su Namun. It turns out this has been a threat a secret society has been worrying about for thousands of years, and, well, oops.

So here's something which kind of bothers me. As Imhotep strengthens in power, the citizens of Cairo are brought under his mind control. But of course Our Heroes are not. Why not? What makes them exempt? If it's that they are not Egyptian, that only sort of works. After all, Ardeth (Oded Fehr) and Terrence (Erick Avari) Bey aren't controlled by him, and of course Evy and Jon are half-Egyptian themselves. Come to that, why is he able to mind-control anyone? What gives Imhotep the power he has? There's this horrible curse against anyone who raises him, and that I get; after all, the Egyptians seriously believed in that kind of thing. A grim enough curse is enough to dissuade much of anything. But weaselly little Beni (Kevin J. O'Connor) is specifically said to be immune to all the horrors, which means that Imhotep controls them in some way. But if he had that power at the time, how did they kill him in the first place?

Oh, I know. You're not supposed to think about that kind of thing, because this is a silly action movie. A kind of cut-rate [i]Indiana Jones[/i]. And I defend [i]Indiana Jones[/i] (yes, all four of them) for a lot of implausibilities because they are just boys' adventure novels brought to the screen. And okay, we're working on the same principle here. Really, I've just given an example of why I don't read that kind of book, because I will persist in thinking that sort of thing anyway. Frankly, for the most part, I was able to let go. This is probably because the movie thought about a lot of things that I do. The ancient Egyptian did not rise from the dead able to speak English. Indeed, he doesn't even just sort of learn it, though I came up with a mechanism for that. Leaving aside that he wouldn't have had a brain, because the Egyptians threw those away. And, yeah, some errors in Egyptology. But few that were terribly glaring, and most of them were about the state of the discipline at the time the movie is set.

What sells this movie most for me, despite my perverse fondness for Brendan Fraser, is really Rachel Weisz. For one thing, she is an action movie heroine who isn't a total lump. Is the appearance of the villain her fault? Well, yeah, at least partly. However, the men are equally to blame, and the real problem is that they weren't sharing enough information. However, she didn't just kind of lie around and scream, at least not until she was physically chained in place. She was the brains of the outfit, and the movie developed so that she was an equal partner in the adventure. She needed to be rescued by Brendan Fraser, yes, but he wouldn't have been able to rescue her without her knowledge. And she's just charming. Goofy and klutzy, okay, but immediately likeable. And lovely. And the movie sort of glides past the "first, they don't like each other" by making sure we know that it's situational. They're both a little stressed, but they aren't actually incompatible. So much better for the sequels, which alas weren't better.