The Mummy Strikes By Bob Gough

The Mummy Strikes
By Bob Gough

5/5/99

Directed/Written by Stephen Sommers

Cast: Rick O'Connell: Brendan Fraser Evelyn: Rachel Weisz Jonathan: John Hannah Beni: Kevin J. O'Connor Imhotep: Arnold Vosloo Rated PG-13; opens May 7
You can't help but like Universal's rollicking, two-fisted remake of the Boris Karloff classic The Mummy. The film tries so hard, and so overtly, to make you like it, that resistance is futile. Despite falling into some unfortunate cultural stereotypes and some minor plot holes, the viewer is quickly swept up in the over-the-top special effects and action.
Plot Summary
Warning: Spoilers!
The year is 1923. The brawny Legionnaire Rick O'Connell and his weasely companion Beni stumble across the hidden ruins of Hamunaptra -- an Egyptian Necropolis wherein lies the treasure of the Pharoahs -- while fighting Bedouins. Later, while O'Connell languishes in a Cairo prison's death row, Evelyn bargains for his life in exchange for knowledge of the legendary city's location.
O'Connell travels with Evelyn, an Egyptologist and librarian, and her bumbling brother Jonathan to the ruins, all the while racing against another team led by the untrustworthy Beni.
When the two teams uncover the tomb of Imhotep-an ancient Egyptian priest mummified alive for the sin of violating the Pharoah's concubine-the unleash his curse. Imhotep then sets about unleashing several plagues on modern Egypt, draining the bodies of the tomb desecrators to gain strength and kidnapping Evelyn as a means of bringing his beloved concubine back to life.
O'Connell, Jonathan and Ardeth Bay, a desert warrior dedicated to keeping Imhotep's evil under the ground where it belongs, track the undead priest and Evelyn back to Hamunaptra where the battle for the fate of the world hangs in the balance.
Analysis
The film is thematically a mixed bag: horror, comedy, romance, action and adventure all combine to produce a very palatable visual experience. The film is creepy, literally with thousands of flesh-eating scarabs playing a key role. Imhotep, the undead mummy himself, is a nasty mess of rotting flesh. Vosloo portrays the priest as truly imbued with confidence and power, stalking across the landscape like a panther-smirking at modern man's attempts to stop his plans.
Leavening the horror are some genuinely funny moments, such as Jonathan's somewhat ingenious method of escaping a legion of boil-bearing thralls of Imhotep. The film is not afraid to poke fun at itself, which is indeed a saving grace.
Brendan Fraser fans will find much to love about the movie. He bursts through nearly every scene and plays the loveable scamp he's made a career out of in George of the Jungle, Airheads and Blast From the Past. The film plays at the attraction between his character, O'Connell, and Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) in a very light-hearted manner.
The romance is nearly submerged by the action, however, which is bruising and non-stop. There's no letup to the danger and much ammunition is spent as the team of explorers engage in a very Indiana Jones brand of archeology. The scenes of O'Connell swinging sword against sorcery are particularly gasp-inducing.
Hats off to the costume and makeup crews who designed some truly stunning ancient Egyptian threads (or lack thereof in the case of the stunning concubine Anck Su Namun, played by Patricia Velasquez) and skin art. Likewise, the modern costuming, both Western European and Egyptians, captured and enhanced the look and feel of 1923.
The special effects were truly stunning and were even more impressive when one considers Sommers' budget was cut from his original outlay. The scenes inside the tombs of the Necropolis are the most impressive, with dozens of undead crawling like spiders on the walls and jumping into combat.
Filmed on location in Morocco, The Mummy does a yeoman's job of transporting the viewer to Cairo and Giza as well as the ancient desert of the Old Kingdom.
The Mummy is fun, summer fare with tons of thrills and chills. That being said, however, one can easily take issue with the movie's cultural insensitivity and predictable plot. Modern Egyptians in the film are cast into three equally unflattering categories: greedy, smelly and stupid (such as the Warden, played by Omid Djalili); thoroughly Westernized lackeys to the British Empire (Curator, played by Erick Avari) or as the "noble savage"-destined to die for the greater good of Christiandom and Western culture (Ardeth Bay, played by Odeth Fehr). It's not particularly surprising that Sommers also did Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, given the similarities in themes.
It's a common fallacy of Western literature, so expertly pointed out in Edward Said's Orientalism, that it is the right and good goal of the rational West to plumb and ferret out the secrets of the East (in this case the treasures of Hamunaptra). To the film's credit, however, the plot does point out that pursuing this quest is a self-destructive path (see The Heart of Darkness) as most of the treasure-seeking Westerners die rather horribly.
Like the tomb, the female lead, Evelyn, is also considered a mystery to be solved and conquered. Sommers' script buys directly into this by giving Weisz the drunken line "What's a nice place like me doing in a girl like this?", thoroughly equating her femininity with all of ancient Egypt, the undiscovered country that the Western male, O'Connell, has every right to plunder by virtue of his Western maleness.
These objections, however, can be applied to so much of Western literature and film, it would nearly impossible to find an action-adventure film that did not bow to the great archive of every Western story written since Aristotle.
The Mummy, although somewhat more up-front with his cultural bias, is no more offensive and a great deal more entertaining than many of its peers.