In short: The Mummy (1999)

Growing into one’s middle age is a curious and sometimes disturbing process. Case in point: one day, you wake up and find that you have actually grown to like Stephen Sommers’s The Mummy rather a lot – a film you’ve held up as a great example of really dumb and incompetent blockbuster filmmaking for nearly two decades. Worse still, I’d even call the film pretty damn good instead of just “entertaining”. Clearly, either wisdom or a slow decay of mental faculties comes with age. At least I still have Michael Bay to look down upon.

But seriously, if you go in expecting to see all kinds of silly nonsense, and stop taking yourself so damn seriously (I may or may not be speaking to myself) Sommers’s Mummy is the epitome of an effective and charming, efficiently and really rather cleverly written big loud entertainment. Sommers, while certainly not a visual artist, makes the best out of all the glories late 90s CGI can buy, and puts his characters through one exciting and pretty damn awesome action sequence after the next.

However, director and film never forget that you do need some human grounding to your awesome spectacle, so they treat the romance between hero Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) and heroine-librarian Evie Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) not just to get a checkmark on the list of mandatory plot elements, but as if they actually meant it. It may not be a deep, believable portray of actual human romantic interaction, but the film is full of the sort of snappy, glowing banter between lovers old Hollywood loved, resulting in a leading couple you actually root for during the film’s breathless series of set pieces. Which is only right and proper, giving how old Hollywood the film’s obvious other influences also are.

Adding to the film’s huge charm is how many things of import it actually lets characters do who aren’t the male lead, so Evie actually does quite a bit more than your typical blockbuster heroine (that Weisz is charming as all get-out while actually doing shit is certainly not to the film’s detriment either), Evie’s comic relief brother John Hannah never becomes obnoxious and useless as is tradition, and the traditional brown sidekick (Oded Fehr) might even be the actual hero of the piece.


Honestly, I have no idea what was wrong with me not liking this one.