***SPOILERS***
The Mummy is a welcome return to the Indiana Jones school of comic book movie-making, a horror movie filled with spectacular special effects. It opens with a prologue set in ancient Egypt, where the priest Imhotep, caught by Pharaoh playing around with the royal concubine Anck-su-namum, kills Pharaoh before escaping into the desert. She is killed and he steals her body and tries to resurrect her. Before he can complete the ceremony he and his priests are captured by Pharaoh's bodyguards. The priests are mummified alive and Imhotep is subjected to the worst punishment of all: the homdei (sp?). He is bound in bandages and placed alive into a sarcophagus with flesh-eating scarab beetles, to remain undead forever. There is a catch, however: if anyone reads aloud the inscription in the black Book of the Dead, Imhotep will arise and regenerate, bringing the ten plagues of Egypt and laying waste to the earth. So his sarcophagus is buried at the foot of a gigantic Anubis statue in the City of the Dead, Hamunaptra, where it is guarded by an Arab tribe.
The action moves on 3000 years, to 1923 Hamunaptra, with the passage of time nicely presented by showing us the Anubis statue weathering and silting up over the millenia. Here we are introduced to Rick O'Connell, a comic-book heroic American played by Brendan Fraser, and the loathsome Benny, a slime who will betray anything and anyone to save his own skin. Then we move to 1926, meeting ditsy, bookish heroine Evie (Rachel Weisz), a librarian at the Cairo Museum of Antiquities, and her ne'er-do-well drunken brother Jonathan (a very suntanned John Hannah). Jonathan has picked a pocket in the bar and found an Egyptian puzzle box, which Evie manages to unlock. Within is a map showing the location of the by-now mythical "treasure city" of Hamunaptra. They track down the chap whose pocket Jonathan picked, and find him in jail, about to be hanged. Of course it is O'Connell, who tells them he has been to this mythic city and can lead them there. Evie manages to save his neck by promising the prison governor a quarter share in the profits of the expedition. Then they all set off to Hamunaptra.
Of course, there are various obstacles to be overcome along the way, particularly a group of stereotypical brawns-not-brains Americans who are also on their way to Hamunaptra, guided by Benny. Once they get there the two expeditions fight over who gets to dig where. Eventually the Americans end up discovering the Book of the Dead in the base of the Anubis statue, while our heroes find Imhotep's sarcophagus, where he has somehow managed to leave not only fingernail scratches but also a message carved into the solid rock of the lid. The message reads "Death is only the beginning", and the corpse is suspiciously "juicy" for a 3000 year old mummy. Naturally, it isn't long before Evie's curiosity leads her to steal the Book from the Americans and read it, thereby freeing the mummy and unleashing the first plague, the plague of locusts.
The mummy sets out to clothe its bones with flesh,
stealing the eyes and tongue of one of the Americans. It also sees Evie and
decides she is the ideal vessel to house the reincarnated spirit of Anck-su-namum
The Mummy is a lot of fun. So the story is simplistic and the characters are all stereotypes (particularly the Egyptians, who are either noble desert warriors or smelly illiterate pig-things). Who cares? The special effects are truly spectacular. I found them far more impressive than those in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, since they look less obviously computer generated and plasticky. There are scary jump scenes aplenty (not to mention the very creepy flesh-eating scarab beetles - the skittery noise they make, and their sheer numbers, play very effectively on the instinctive human fear of bugs). It's also laugh-out-loud funny. John Hannah gets most of the good lines, and he makes his drunken, selfish, amoral character very sympathetic. Brendan Fraser is sufficiently tall and deep-voiced to fit the bill of cartoon hero, and Rachel Weisz is likable as the dizzy but independent Evie. Kevin O'Connor is really crawly and loathsome as Benny: our fingers are itching to push him off a cliff or choke him. The acting for the supporting characters is fine: these roles are 2D stereotypes, we're not talking about Oscar nominations.
The movie has no Indiana Jones, no strong central character. Instead the Indiana characteristics are parcelled out among the characters - there is a wisecracking one, a heroic one, and a scholarly one. This works just as well, and The Mummy is another fine example of those cartoonish films that are so much fun on a Saturday afternoon. At one point O'Connell is talking to a doddery old RAF colonel, and tells him their mission is to "rescue the damsel in distress, kill the bad guy, save the world". It's the classic movie storyline, combined in this film with some good lines, a good-looking cast, and truly impressive special effects. The Mummy is a funny, scary, thoroughly enjoyable experience. Leave your brain at home.
(c) Jennifer Mellerick 1999