Of all the horror franchises of the 1930s and '40s, the "Mummy" films, which mostly featured Lon Chaney Jr. swaddled in Army-surplus bandages and lurching after some screaming young woman, probably have the worst reputation. This was never completely fair; Karl Freund's original 1932 "The Mummy" (Boris Karloff's only turn in the gauze-wrapped role) is one of the most suspenseful and atmospheric horror movies of the period, and the Hammer Films 1959 remake starring Christopher Lee is also luridly effective. But the undead Egyptian priest, I guess, seemed to lack the philosophical and/or erotic possibilities of the Frankenstein and Dracula legends. Despite our info-glutted society's growing fascination with the mystical traditions of ancient cultures, contemporary filmmakers have let the mummies sleep.
So ends our history lesson for this week. Mummy-fanciers (if there are any of you), be warned: Stephen Sommers' "The Mummy" borrows almost nothing from the great, neglected, dude-looks-like-a-burn-victim tradition except its title and a cheesola opening sequence that represents ancient Egypt as an enormous Vegas hotel, complete with showgirls in fishnet jumpsuits and gold lami body paint. What we've really got here is a tame screwball adventure dressed up with some desert scenery and some awful computer graphics. (Somehow there's cosmic justice in the fact that movie makers can now spend the gross national product of Romania on special effects and still wind up with something that looks like a teenager's Web page.) If you're 11 years old and not hip enough for "The Matrix," or if "Romancing the Stone" was your favorite movie of all time, you might make a satisfying multiplex afternoon out of "The Mummy." On the other hand, if you prefer movies where it seems like somebody involved might have given a crap, skip it.
As Rick O'Connell, the jazz-age Yank adventurer who leads an expedition to the forbidden city of Hamunaptra that accidentally unleashes "an unholy flesh eater with the power of the ages," Brendan Fraser is an engaging, even endearing presence. But despite his studly physique, Fraser doesn't make a commanding centerpiece for an action film. While he shares something of the aw-shucks Middle America demeanor of James Stewart or Harrison Ford, both can have an intensity, a neediness, that Fraser lacks. Something in his puppy eyes tells you he just doesn't take being hanged, or devoured by legions of the undead, all that seriously. English actress Rachel Weisz, who plays Evelyn, the spunky librarian who briefly pretends to resist Rick's charms, is the same kind of cheerful, low-wattage performer. With brown ringlets framing her pre-Raphaelite face, Weisz is darn cute without seeming the least bit sexual. Sommers wisely keeps their relationship PG-chaste; it's hard to imagine this couple doing anything heavier than playing Twister all night before collapsing into a giggling dog pile.
Actually, the opening scenes of "The Mummy" are far more enjoyable than the rest of the movie, what with the Hefneresque display of ancient Theban babeage, a bunch of rebellious priests being mummified alive and "Egyptian" dialogue subtitled in a lovely serif font. For messing with the Pharaoh's concubine, Prince Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo, looking like the runner-up in a Yul Brynner look-alike contest) not only gets mummified alive, he has his tongue cut out first and then gets buried with a squirming truckload of flesh-eating scarabs. Yum! "I've never seen a mummy look like this before," gasps Evelyn when her gang opens his fingernail-scarred sarcophagus several thousand years later. "He's still ... he's still juicy," chimes in Rick.
But such moments of genuine gross-out humor are few. Mostly we witness a splashy but unmemorable array of fight scenes in pseudo-exotic locations (like the sex and the horror, the violence in "The Mummy" is strictly lite). First, French Foreign Legion vet Rick, along with Evelyn and her simpering brother Jonathan (John Hannah), must battle mysterious bandits and rival explorers on riverboats, in desert camps and through the caverns of the buried city. Then the completely unterrifying Imhotep returns to assimilate everyone's "organs and fluids," and so conquer the earth. (Don't ask.) He brings with him the 10 biblical plagues of Egypt, which all appear to involve blobs of unidentifiable glop exploding on a matte painting of Cairo. I've seen some lame-o movie monsters in my time, but this guy is among the dumbest. When Evelyn reads the fateful inscription out of her newfound copy of the Book of the Dead, the hideous creature that is awakened looks something like a baked brie sculpture (badly overcooked) and something like a mangy, earless Abyssinian cat.
"The Mummy" should benefit from being the first major release of blockbuster season. The central couple is blandly cheerful, Hannah is an able comedian, and the first few subterranean scenes -- full of distant, cacophonous chattering and hordes of rampaging scarabs -- build some creepy atmosphere. But for all its color and scenery, this is a pallid production without an ounce of real spirit or invention, and the more it throws expensive animation at you, the cheaper it looks (the deus ex machina Evelyn finally conjures up to defeat Imhotep is a shameful dud). Sommers' formula script even seems to have absorbed the racial attitudes of its '20s setting -- there are jokes presenting Arabs as dirty and conniving, and Beni (Kevin O'Connor), a cowardly, greedy sidekick character, reads strongly as Jewish. And by the time a few guys wrapped in bandages finally shuffle in to lend the proceedings some sense of dignity and propriety, the damn thing is over.
