‘I only gamble with my life, never my money...’
1999 has now been canonised as one of the greatest movie years of all time. Fight Club, The Matrix, Magnolia, Election, Being John Malkovich, American Pie, The Sixth Sense, Eyes Wide Shut… the list goes on (and on). It should also be noted, however, that of the 39 films released that year that grossed over $100 million at the box office, not all of them were great, some of them were downright bad. Tarzan was the fifth highest grossing film of the year. Wild Wild West and Jan De Bont’s turgid remake of The Haunting made the top 20.
Where does Stephen Sommers remake of The Mummy fit into all this (for that, dear reader, is why we are here)? Well, its gross of just shy of $156 million made it the 26th most successful film of the year sandwiched between Payback and The Bone Collector (we used to be a country etc etc). The film was met by a shrug from most critics at the time (although it inspired some of Roger Ebert’s most wonderful writing: “There is hardly a thing I can say in its favour, except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script, the direction, the acting or even the mummy, but I can say that I was not bored and sometimes I was unreasonably pleased”), and yet, this iteration of The Mummy seems to have prospered in the years since its release, to the point where it is now considered a minor classic.
The plot is fairly simple. Brendan Fraser plays Indiana Jones stand in Rick O’ Connell in his quest to trek to the lost city of Hamunaptra. Along for the ride are Rachel Weisz as the love interest, John Hannah as her brother and Arnold Vosloo as the the titular mummy.
As Ebert mentioned in his review, The Mummy is a lot of fun. It’s a great popcorn flick. Fraser and Weisz are both incredibly charming in their own way and it is their undeniable star power and chemistry that carries the film through some pretty dated CGI and some forgettable dialogue. The action sequences are exhilarating and memorable. Put simply, this is the kind of solid action/genre hybrid that were ten a penny in the ’90s. Watching it now made me nostalgic for an era in which you could go to the cinema and be presented with a genuine choice of disparate and mid to high quality movies (I realise the irony, of course, that The Mummy is itself a remake (that spawned a new franchise), and that, as I write this, Lee Cronin’s stab at The Mummy is still in theatres).
While I enjoyed the experience of revisiting this movie again for the first time in over a decade, it pales in comparison to stuff like Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Princess Bride. The Mummy is a solid, if perhaps slightly overrated, historical romp through ancient Egypt that seems destined to retain its cult status for years to come. Let’s ignore the sequels though…
