Review: THE MUMMY

(reviewed at United Artists 17 on Delaware Avenue on Thursday, May 6th, 1999 w/ mom)

   Let’s re-make “The Godfather”, or how about “Braveheart” as a six hour CBS mini-series? Why not? These days nothing is sacred. Just last week I had the audacity to attend a preview screening for Universal’s newest remake, “The Mummy”. The good thing is that it’s far, far, far from Boris Karloff’s 1932 classic of the same name.
    Stephen Sommers wrote and directed this big budget mess. He’s also the brains behind the tongue-in-cheek sea monster flick “Deep Rising” which I, being a good film critic, didn’t see.
    He’s added his tonge-in-cheek dialogue and action/adventure plot to an ILM special f/x film with an $80+ million budget.
    You would think that that would be a recipe for success…right? Wrong. “The Mummy” should never have been remade. It’s bad enough they re-make TV shows like “Wild, Wild, West” just because they’re out of ideas, but “The Mummy”? Everyone knows the mummy. Everyone loves the mummy. Why did Universal have to come out with a major disaster to create new ideas in young kid’s minds, “The Mummy sucks.”
    Brendan Fraser is the Indiana Jones style good guy who is in the foreign legion. He shows up after the awful prologue takes place back in Ancient Egypt where an Egyptian is mummified alive and has a curse put on him.
    Fraser finds the city of dead and eventually ends up in prison where he is hung…or not. With his knowledge of the location of this city of the dead, he takes off on an epic journey with a brother/sister team and a fat Egyptian prison warden of sorts. Another group of dudes is also going to the city of the dead.
    Without giving anything away, they find it, release the mummy and his curse, and try to make things right through thousands of bullets and a few really silly special f/x.
    The one thing I really enjoyed in this film was the action. There wasn’t nary a dull moment. The searchers hop on a normal boat and all of a sudden there’s a massive gunfight and the boat explodes. The bad thing is the action turns incredibly ridiculous towards the end when more than one mummy shows up, especially when the army of mummies start marching around with their uniforms over their skeletal bodies and practically start bouncing off the walls.
    I realize the dialogue Sommers’ wrote pokes fun at itself, but the movie is really idiotic. It’s not a good movie, which is surprising when you figure in the great material you have here. The fucking mummy. You would think any movie involving the mummy would kick ass. Picture the catacombs. Picture an explorer alone in the catacombs. Picture an explorer alone in the dark catacombs when his flashlight has gone out. Picture an explorer alone in the dark catacombs and he hears a russling, something is coming after him, it’s the mother fucking mummy!
    Re-makes suck, and this film more than proves it. *1/2 (out of ****)