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It's nice to see a big-budget treatment of a classic 1930s Universal horror film do so well at the box-office. Not because this one is that great, but because more will now certainly follow, maybe until somebody gets it right. And – this is a big "and" – I'd had neither inclination nor opportunity to really nit-pick a movie to death since Independence Day, and was getting a little antsy. See, The Mummy could have been soooo good; instead, it's merely so -- movie. But that's just an opinion, and I certainly don't want to alienate my friends who are theater managers, generally very hardworking folks with little if any input into which releases they actually exhibit, by suggesting moviegoers stay away. So read on, taking heed of a minor spoiler or two, and if you haven't seen it yet, go check it out, keeping track of the slip-ups so we can compare notes.
The tried-and-true horror device in The Mummy is certainly entertaining enough, considering it hit with three generations of filmgoers. Encouraged by public fascination with the curse that supposedly killed 21 people involved in the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb in 1923, Universal alone did four mummy films in the 30s and 40s. (The first, the 1932 original starring Boris Karloff, is one of the scariest, most atmospheric bits of celluloid you could ever hope to see.*) They were followed in the 50s and 60s by detours into the Abbott & Costello and "I Was a Teenage ____" subgenres, a stylish remake starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing from Hammer Films (the ensemble who also remade all the other Universal themes, starting in 1956 with the first "modern Gothic" film, Horror of Dracula), and a slew of highly enjoyable (at least to schlock fans) Aztec mummy movies from the energetic Mexican film industry. More recently Francis Ford Coppola produced or directed updates of Dracula and Frankenstein, and Anne Rice stepped into the ancient Egyptian milieu; a new mummy movie was practically crying out through the gauze to be made.
This time, Brendan Fraser stars – in a cast where he is easily the biggest name, so more of the $80 million budget could to go to sets and effects and less to actors' paychecks – as Rick O'Connell (almost an anagram for "Chris O'Donnell" – makes you wonder who the producers really wanted for the part), an indefatigable American mercenary fighting with the French Foreign Legion in 1923. During the heat of battle he stumbles onto the lost city of Hamunaptra, burial place of ancient high priest Im-ho-tep, whom we met in a prologue featuring an eye-popping computer-generated cityscape of ancient Thebes, although it isn't really any grander than the traditionally animated scenes from Disney's The Prince of Egypt, and the tiny little CGI Egyptian citizens still look as unconvincing as that bearded video-game cartoon at the helm in Titanic.Ý Played by South African actor Arnold Varloo, who, at least with his head shaved, looks something like cross between Billy Zane and Ray Milland, the priest was entombed alive and tongueless with flesh-eating beetles in 1290 BC as punishment for bedding Anck-su-namun (Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Patricia Velasquez), the mistress of Pharaoh Seti I, then killing him with her help (not that you'd blame him, seeing how she always paraded around displaying her charms in a Rose McGowanesque fishnet – desert people have to work to stay cool). A few years after his discovery, O'Connell is recruited by a couple adventurous British-Egyptian scholars – maladroit librarian Evelyn Carnarvon (Rachel Weisz) and her less altruistic brother Jonathan (Sliding Doors) – to find and explore the site. In competition, and eventually concert, with a much larger American expedition comprising cowboys on horseback, they brave attack by a warrior sect of pharaonic guards (led by a guy who looks exactly like George Harrison – is that a coincidence too, or more beetle motif?) who for 3,000 years have protected the city from the world and the world from Im-ho-tep's curse, and find his sarcophagus.
And promptly unleash not only one pissed-off, wormy, shape-shifting ancient Terminator, but the ten biblical plagues; no wonder Westerners are so unwelcome in the Middle East. It all turns out okay, though, thanks to Evelyn's scholarship, O'Connell's bravado, a white cat, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead (not to be confused with the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Or the Cleveland Book of the Dead).
The Mummyis one great big ol' movie that strives mightily for Indiana Jones-hood. Everything about it is huge: big weather, big fights, music from Jerry Goldsmith, cinematography by Oscar-nominated Adrian Biddle (Aliens), production design by Allan Cameron (Highlander, Starship Troopers), and of course the desert itself (filmed on location in Morocco). But it was directed and written by Stephen Sommers, who most recently did the formulaic, waterlogged action/horror piece Deep Rising. And Mr. Sommers has a much better eye for cliché than for detail. Problems and hackneyed gimmicks include: in an elaborate early stunt that seems to have been included only as an excuse to stage the world's largest domino fall, Evelyn demonstrates her clumsiness by destroying the cavernous library of her employer; in another early scene, O'Connell is hanged at the gallows, but is rescued when not only doesn't his neck break after dropping through the trap, but following a couple minutes' dangle while Evelyn – who metamorphoses from frump to strumpet simply by doffing her glasses and hairpin (remember the Thomas Dolby video, "Blinded By Science?" "Good heavens, Miss Yakamoto, you're beautiful!") – and the jailer haggle over his fate, the rope hasn't even scratched his neck; spying Hamunaptra in the distance, the cowboys on horseback race the heroes on camelback to the city, the loping dromedaries easily outdistancing a whole army of thoroughbreds (see "speed problem" footnote below). And the air of suspense is often ruined by the director's pathological need to telegraph everything, even if it's another cliché: when the occidentals start getting spooked, somebody answers the question "What do you think is out there?" with "In a word – Evil;" when, with a nod to Indy, one character says, "Look out for bugs; I hate bugs," you know he's insect fodder (he gets eaten by the killer CGI scarabs, which scurry along the ground faster than a taxiing 737 – see "speed problem"); before opening the tome in question, with its standard re-animating incantation, Evelyn says, "It's just a book; no harm ever came out of reading a book;" speaking of which, every time someone opens anything – a door, a bottle, a box, a dinner meeting – there's always an high-pitched, threatening sound offscreen, like someone popped the lid on a walk-in Tupperware container full of angry sparrows; when a nearsighted chap drops his glasses in a dark passageway, naturally somebody steps on them, leaving him to stumble around with his hands outstretched and run right into – the mummy, who promptly steals his eyes, but then has no trouble seeing with them himself; and as the mummy, who's more of a brawny Biology I dissection lab gone awry than a bandaged gimp, fleshes out by stealing the essence and fluids of his desecrators, he actually gets physically smaller, until he's a flesh-and-blood actor again rather than lines of code in the FX company's mainframe.
But what do I know. Silly is good. Silly is our friend. And one or two of the scenes are pretty darn silly, in the positive sense. So if you can convince your logic to go play in traffic for a couple hours while you're at the theater, The Mummy isn't too bad of a way to open summer movie season. After all, with $45 million in first-weekend ticket sales, it has to be good, right? I would have much preferred something with more drama, more scares, more character development, and a whole lot less limp humor. But what do I know. C
*This, despite suffering from the "speed problem." You know, where somebody is chased by something slow, and it does no good to scream, "Will you just try running a little faster, for crying out loud?" because the victim is going to trip over a root, or run down a blind alley, or simply stand fixed to the spot in abject terror anyway. (Some directors have also employed a trick called the "speed problem nullifier" to deal with such inequities in velocity. The camera shows the feet of the shuffling ghoul, then the feet of the running victim, then the ghoul feet, then the victim's feet running even faster, and so on, until the shot goes wide again and the monster is right there, having apparently stepped through a miniature warp in space only monsters know about to instantly close a fifty-yard gap. There's also an "inverse speed problem nullifier," as seen in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, where a couple dozen people flee a hungry T. rex, which we've already been told can outrun a Porsche Boxster, and the beast is so close they can smell the after-shave of the guys he ate in the first movie, then the camera cuts to a close-up of Julianne Moore – who you would think is about to become julienne Moore – then back to the rex, shifting between them to sustain the boo a couple minutes, and the damned dinosaur never does catch any of them.) Besides, what made the mummy so frightening to people who never stopped to think he was as flammable as a box of gasoline-soaked bacon and all they had to do was toss a lit match at his moth-eaten ass, then sweep up the ashes, was that he would never, ever give up, and his intended victims eventually had to stop and rest some time, so if nothing else he could strangle them in their sleep. Plus, they never listened to their dogs, which as Bill Cosby once pointed out, were always out on the deserted street at 3 a.m. chasing the mummy, going "Arf! Arf! Aarggbbllll! There's a guy…out here…with the thing…and the toilet paper…hangin' from him…"
ÝOne of these days the wisdom of computer-generated graphics, like the soundness of parental advice against maxing-out too many credit cards while still in college, may become clearer. Images of striking beauty and originality, as in A Bug's Life or The Matrix, can be crafted with software, especially when it's used to create something that plays on the strengths of the medium. But the art form has been derailed in being most often utilized to whip up cheaper, and cheaper-looking, substitutions for real things. I mean, Da Vinci didn't paint the Mona Lisa so he could take it out for lunch at the bistro and set it in the seat next to him hoping the other patrons would marvel, "What a beautiful, enigmatic dinner companion you have this evening. She certainly is demure – doesn't eat much, either. Why, when she turns sideways you can hardly see her at all." Didn't work for Leonardo or Jan Brady,either. And if the porno industry ever gets hold of some really talented programmers, a lot of hard-working actors are going to be out of work…although silicon viruses would be a lot less painful and embarrassing to pass around than the organic kind.
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