‘THE Mummy” is a delightfully old-fashioned adventure yarn that pays no heed to political correctness or modern fashion. If you’ve missed movies with battles in the desert, biplanes, proud Berber tribesmen, human sacrifice, villainous foreign officials and a handsome hero in jodhpurs and riding boots who is sure to get the girl, then “The Mummy” is for you.
Unlike the Indiana Jones movies it resembles, “The Mummy” feels no need to mix swashbuckling action with New Age mysticism or gross sadism. Instead it remains faithful not just to the original 1932 Boris Karloff movie but to great pulp novels about lost cities and ancient curses by authors like H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
To his credit, writer-director Stephen Sommers avoids the temptation to make too much fun of the genre. He keeps the camp quotient at about 25 percent, so that the laughs – and there are plenty of them – don’t undermine the thrills.
The movie opens with a prologue set in a colorful and impressive – if slightly fake-looking – ancient Egyptian city. A voice-over narrator relates the story of the powerful sorcerer Imhotep, who was caught in an affair with Pharaoh’s beautiful mistress, murdered his master, and was then punished with an agonizing, endless living death in a cursed tomb in the cursed city of Hamunaptra.
Three thousand years later, who should come upon this lost city with its fabled wealth but American soldier of fortune Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser). He arrives with a battalion of Legionnaires (from Libya, although it was an Italian colony in 1923) that is immediately annihilated by desert tribesmen led by the descendants of the Egyptian high priests.
O’Connell makes it back to Cairo and is about to be hanged for an unspecified crime, when antiquities expert Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) and her roguish brother Jonathan (John Hannah) rescue him so that he can lead them to the lost city.
Once they set out down the Nile, they find themselves in competition with a more ruthless Anglo-American expedition. But when the two expeditions jointly find Hamunaptra, they unleash the undead Imhotep with his awesome powers of destruction. Soon Imhotep turns up in Cairo, assimilating the internal organs of those who’ve awakened him, commanding an army of zombies, and inflicting the 10 biblical plagues on the city.
If the good guys don’t stop him, not only will Imhotep take over the world, but along the way he’ll sacrifice Evelyn, so as to bring his ancient mistress back to life. And the only way to stop Imhotep is to defy his magic and his swarms of man-eating beetles, and invoke the spells in an ancient book of incantations hidden at Hamunaptra.
As a traditional roughneck hero, Fraser does early Harrison Ford with verve and assurance. Rachel Weisz, a doll-like English beauty, handles her mostly comic role well and looks great in a veil. But the show is all but stolen by South African actor Arnold Vosloo as the handsome, terrifying Imhotep, who is willing to do anything to restore his lost love.
Sensitive filmgoers accustomed to more pious depictions may be shocked by the traditional if mild and fairly even-handed stereotyping. The men are masculine, the woman is feminine. Americans are mercenary but tough, Brits are eccentric but brave. Berbers are romantic and mysterious, and most other foreigners are corrupt and cowardly but viciously dangerous when in the grip of superstition.
“The Mummy” isn’t art. It’s cheerful, slightly cheesy entertainment that uses the latest special-effects techniques to breathe life into a venerable film tradition. The best of these is the sandstorm-with-a-face whipped up by Imhotep, but the Harryhausen-esque animated skeletons that hack at Brendan Fraser are remarkably lifelike.
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THE MUMMY
Starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. Written and directed by Stephen Sommers. Running time: 91 minutes. Rating: R. At the Astor Plaza, the Beekman, the Waverly, others.