Review: The Mummy (1999)

The Mummy (1999)

Rated PG-13 for pervasive adventure violence and some partial nudity

Score: 4 out of 5

In the last several years, I've noticed a stunning critical reappraisal of The Mummy, the loose 1999 remake of Universal's 1932 horror classic. Growing up, I never saw this film spoken of all that highly, with many describing it as a decent time-waster but a pale shadow of the original, one that traded creeping terror and Boris Karloff for loud, violent action and a wisecracking Brendan Fraser. While it was a box-office hit, it got only mixed reviews; as of this writing, its Tomatometer sits just on the wrong side of Rotten at 59%. I'm only partly convinced that it was the dreadful 2017 version of the film, which really was that bad, that caused this reevaluation; sure, it might have caused some to give the 1999 version another look on a "well, at least it wasn't the Tom Cruise version" level, but enough that now, when you talk about "the good version of The Mummy", you have to specify whether it's this one or the Karloff film?

Well, Popcorn Frights was kind enough to do a screening of this film on Friday night, and having seen it in full for the first time (I'd seen bits and pieces, especially courtesy of the Nostalgia Critic's review, but never the entire film from start to finish), I can see why it's been getting all this praise. Once you put aside the dated CG effects, this is a film that holds up extremely well after twenty years, even if, at the time, it may have been hard to appreciate. It's more action than horror, and the action is staged and shot phenomenally. The cast is outstanding, particularly Fraser in a role that would be right at home in a Marvel movie. The makeup and effects work on Imhotep may not be as timeless as those on Karloff's version of the character, but his imposing and threatening performance made up for it. It has a wicked sense of humor that helped sell its Indiana Jones homage as well as the period set design did. Just as the Karloff version was an exemplar of '30s Hollywood horror, so is this film an example of the same genre in the '90s: big, glamorous, and a really fun time.

In this version, Imhotep was an Egyptian high priest who got caught by the pharaoh having an affair with his favorite concubine, Anck-su-namum. He killed the pharaoh and fled, while she killed herself in front of the guards, knowing that Imhotep would be able to resurrect her. Unfortunately for him, the guards caught up with him as he tried to do so, and as punishment, he was buried alive and subject to a curse stating that whoever opens his sarcophagus shall unleash the Ten Plagues on the land. Fast-forward to 1926, and a pair of brother-sister British Egyptologists, Jonathan and Evelyn Carnahan, discover a map that could lead them to the lost Egyptian city of Hamunaptra. They team up with Rick O'Connell, an American adventurer who discovered the city three years earlier while in the French Foreign Legion, after bailing him out of prison, and reach Hamunaptra alongside a group of American treasure hunters -- at which point both groups are accosted by the Medjai, a secret society that has spent the last three thousand years protecting the secret of Hamunaptra and are willing to kill to stop anybody from releasing Imhotep. Sure enough, that is precisely what they do after dismissing the warnings as so much superstitious nonsense, and now, a great curse threatens to overwhelm the land. What's more, Imhotep still dreams of resurrecting his lover -- and sees Evie as the perfect vessel through which to do it.

I might as well get it out of the way now. If there is a great weak point in this film, it is undoubtedly the CG effects. There are moments when they shine, such as the airplane/sandstorm scene and the climax when the main characters are fighting Imhotep's gross-looking mummy minions. Other times, however, they can be distracting enough to take one out of the film. The prologue in ancient Egypt is done with a massive landscape of pyramids and sphinxes that may have been impressive in 1999, but nowadays looks like a pre-rendered cutscene from a video game in the 2000s. A scene of a meteor shower raining down on Cairo looks even worse. Imhotep himself is a mixed bag effects-wise, especially before he fully regenerates himself. He starts out as a rotting corpse, slowly regaining his flesh as he sucks the souls of his victims, and there were a few moments that worked, most notably when a scarab inhabiting his body crawls out his neck and into the hole in his cheek before getting chomped on in his mouth. For most of the film, however, the effects were plainly obvious and badly dated to the late '90s, pushing Imhotep into the uncanny valley and making him look like a video game character, creepy for the wrong reasons and feeling like he didn't quite belong in the environment around him.

It speaks to the quality of everything else that, despite the bad CGI being glaring in spots, I was able to put it at the back of my mind while watching it, because everything else here is so good and so much fun to watch that it felt like little more than a small quirk. The action here looked like a million bucks, shot like the old-fashioned swashbucklers that the film was clearly taking after, giving everybody plenty of opportunity to shine as they battle bad guys and outrun the various plagues that Imhotep unleashes upon Egypt. A gun battle between the protagonists and the Medjai on a burning riverboat early in the film was a standout, filled with all sorts of little touches that fleshed out the characters and put a smile on my face. Rachel Weisz was charming and had a lot more to do than just play a damsel, her character helping guide the men around her to their destination through her knowledge of the ancient Egyptian language. Oded Fehr plays the Medjai leader as a creepy, morally ambiguous anti-hero who's ultimately on the protagonists' side, but has good reason to not trust them and to see them as getting into more trouble than it's worth. Kevin J. O'Connor was a slimeball through and through as Beni, the greedy leader of the American treasure hunters who gets one of the best scenes in the movie when he tries to bargain with Imhotep (and actually pulls it off). Arnold Vosloo had a lot of work to do overcoming the at-times shaky effects work on Imhotep, but he managed to do it through a mix of his shirtless charisma and his playing to the more monstrous side of the character; when he is in the room, you feel as though dark forces are running through him, and that those forces will consume anybody unlucky enough to be in the same room as him.

The real star, though, was Brendan Fraser. It's odd to think about how, thanks to a mix of some bad role choices and plain bad luck, his career started to flatline just as the modern blockbuster/franchise era of Hollywood really took off, because his character Rick O'Connell felt like the prototype for any number of 21st century Hollywood action heroes: ruggedly attractive, a wicked sense of humor, a knack for getting into and out of trouble, and getting the girl at the end. Harrison Ford may have pioneered this character archetype with Han Solo and Indiana Jones, but Fraser nailed it here, and made Rick into a natural hero who I easily found myself rooting for. This movie has become what most people remember Fraser for, and who can blame them? He'd feel right at home in a Marvel movie with his natural wisecracking attitude, never feeling forced but rather making his roguish, morally gray character instantly compelling to watch.

The Bottom Line

Dated effects are really the only serious problem that this film has. As a pure action-adventure flick with a dash of horror to it, The Mummy is a modern classic and a guide to how this sort of effects-driven, spectacle-filled blockbuster is done. It's no surprise, watching it again, why people have started to look back on it as one of the best summer action movies of its era.