Thousands of years after the high priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) was condemned to an eternity of suffering, librarian Evelyn Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) and her treasure-seeking brother Jonathan (John Hannah) hire adventurer Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) to lead them to the fabled lost city of Hamunaptra. Beneath the sands of Hamunaptra, though, the mummified Imhotep sleeps, and this band of explorers will soon learn that what awaits them is something other than buried treasure – and infinitely worse than death.
I’ve long made the joke that The Mummy may as well be called Indiana Jones and the Curse of Hamunaptra. With a similar pace, setting, atmosphere, and attitude, The Mummy needs only a few cosmetic tweaks to sneak its way into the Indiana Jones franchise for good. Brendan Fraser is heroically fun as our cocky swashbuckling protagonist, a kind of early “fortune and glory” iteration of the good Dr. Jones. He’s got the self-aware sarcasm down pat, yet he can flip to sincerity with a well-timed smolder. In short, Fraser is the key to the movie allowing us to have fun – he’s very clearly enjoying himself, too. Like Fraser, the movie is a master of its own tone, zany and madcap at one turn, cavalier and daring at the next, without losing any of its own integrity. The movie might poke fun at itself, but it never makes a fool of its audience.
Fraser is the perfect model for what’s going on with The Mummy because the film overall is never boring. If it’s not being funny, it’s ably building tension or hosting a rollicking action sequence, helped in no small part by Jerry Goldsmith’s rousing score. As the old meme goes, Jerry Goldsmith didn’t have to go so hard, but he did that – he did that for all of us. Goldsmith’s orchestral work soars, dabbles in the romantic, and plays around in the Arabesque; it works perfectly in the film, and it’s a darned good listen outside of the cinema, too. Longtime readers of the blog know that a good score is often my favorite thing about a movie, and you can get away with a lot if the music is doing its work right. Goldsmith is trying to do an uncomplicated arrangement a la Old Hollywood, but his use of motifs and swirling patterns mean this score isn’t one to ignore. (And yes, I was listening to the score as I wrote this review. How could you tell?)
Among the rest of the cast, everyone is doing their level best to make this world believable, and they do succeed. Weisz and Hannah are divinely cast as bickering siblings – somewhat broadly caricatured, it’s true, but their devotion to the clichés make these characters feel real. Arnold Vosloo, meanwhile, has a real presence as Imhotep, and though he doesn’t say much he’s expressively sinister in the scenes when he has all his skin; when he’s in ‘monster mode,’ Imhotep is creepy and ghastly to behold, which is all the better when the movie needs that quick jolt of terror that only a decaying corpse can deliver.
Then there’s the smaller supporting roles, a veritable who’s-who of late-90s character actors. Oded Fehr (who, incidentally, played a terrorist on Sleeper Cell while Vosloo played one on 24) is tons of fun as the dead-serious protector of Hamunaptra, while Kevin J. O’Connor is equally a blast in the role of servile weasel Beni, handily a top goon in the annals of monster movies. And don’t sleep on Erick Avari, indisputably the fin-de-siècle king of “Hey, it’s that guy!”, in the thankless role of fez-wearing museum curator Dr. Bey (not to be confused with Fehr’s Ardeth Bay); in mummy movies, there’s always a guy with a fez, and there’s always a shady museum curator, so Avari is the pristine cherry on top of a perfect sundae.
One of the things I’ve always loved about The Mummy isn’t quite apparent in the film itself, though it’s equally impossible to ignore. In 1999, The Mummy comes at the tail end of a decade of period pulp films, which is precisely my favorite flavor of cinematic ice cream. I’m thinking of films like Dick Tracy, The Rocketeer, The Shadow, and The Phantom – all of which I loved as a child and still do as an adult. We can enroll Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman in this pattern, and indeed we might even consider it the progenitor of a host of imitations to follow. At the climax of the decade, The Mummy is arguably the most successful of these period pulps, though I’ll always have an elemental soft spot for The Rocketeer. I’m a sucker for this kind of heightened reality, placed into a distinct historical past, without postmodern cynicism or deliberate genre subversion. Take a story and a time period, and revel in it; that’s what The Mummy does best of all.
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