“The Mummy”: a movie that almost removed my brain

I can sum up “The Mummy” (1999), a bloated gasbag of an action movie, with three phrases: phony British accents; Brendan Frasier’s frosted bangs; Scooby-Doo mummies (actually, those guys were scarier than this mummy, and equally cartoonish). I took the whole “Mummy” trilogy out of the library, but am returning it after just barely watching the first one.

In the service of my craft, I will attempt summarize the plot of “The Mummy”, which I can hardly remember two days later (and for that I’m deeply grateful). So, the movie opens in ancient, sexy Egypt, where pharaoh’s mistress, dressed by Frederick’s of Hollywood, pouts in the throne room. Not ten seconds into the movie we see her ass, and it’s all downhill from there. She and Imhotep, the high priest, are lovers; they kill the grumpy pharaoh so they can be together. For some reason, these two plus everyone else in the shot is body-painted gold with kohl raccoon eyes.

The mistress and high priest’s plans are foiled, they both die gruesome deaths at the hands of pharaoh’s bodyguards, who are all wearing cardboard boxes on their heads. Imhotep (who was actually an Egyptian pharaoh, not a priest) is mummified alive with flesh eating scarabs. If anyone ever opens both his sarcophagus and canoptic jars to play with his corpse and/or organs, he will be reborn as the goofiest bad guy to ever trash a closed set.

Fast-forward a few millennia to Egypt in the 1930s. Brendan Frasier, whose character’s name I immediately forgot (I’ll just refer to him as Encino Man) runs straight at a badass local militia, the Magi. They fire right at him but the bullets miss every time—and he’s wearing large white pants, too.

The other Westerners in this movie are a naughty librarian and her fun drunk brother, both rich British kids on a gap year holiday in Egypt. Names? Backstory? Acting ability? Not so much. A series of stupid coincidences brings Encino Man into their lives—shoplifted ancient maps, slappy fisticuffs, you get the idea—and these three team up and head off into the desert to find (and loot) a mythical city. Another team—British fop who won’t live through movie, cartoon American cowboys with guns and suspenders, Arab stereotypes—is hot on their trail.

Oh, and in the middle of a sweltering desert at night, separated from all her luggage, naughty librarian’s hair and makeup are looking great. As is typical in barely plotted action movies, the little woman is to blame—she reads from some ancient phonebook and releases the mummy from hibernation (well, her and the cowboys, who steal his canoptic jars and dump out his organs).

Rather than go any further with the plot, which had holes you could hide a pyramid in, I’ll just write a little about the special effects and Encino Man’s performance, which demoted the movie by at least two stars. The mummy, when finally revealed, evoked some feeling from me, but it wasn’t fear. Really, I felt bad for this mummy—his most special effect was spinning around like the Looney Tunes tasmanian devil (Taz, was that his name?). But it was an effective move, raising dust storms that took out a bunch of extras. His CGI army of the elaborately costumed living dead is even more potent. But the mummy isn’t very bright (he gets most of his organs back, but I never saw his brain reinserted), and instead of killing Encino Man when he has the chance, he makes a lot of smushy faces and whirls off stage. The soundtrack was a few swashbuckly bars endlessly repeated—so, pretty much a video game. Later on, maybe at a kissyface moment, an Anglican choir “ouuuuuuued” the same worn refrain.

Encino Man punches through sandstone pyramid walls and seduces the only available lady (naughty librarian, eyebrows extra-plucked) with soggy punch lines. He has, at least, three facial expressions. Suddenly the mummy crashes in on a bad ancient dust trip, killing off all extraneous characters. Locust swarms rise and meteors rain down on Cairo, fully destroying the city—good job, tourists—and there’s still an excruciating half hour to go. Finally, five hours later, the naughty librarian finds the other 5,000-year-old magic phone book and says the words that cause Mr. mummy to roll his eyes and spaz out. His actual death I can’t remember, which says something about the suspense of this clogged drainpipe of an action movie.

A rating? One star, out of respect for the somewhat early computer graphics artists and makeup crew, who worked tirelessly to make the lead actors halfway palatable. The saddest part, to me, is that this movie must have made a pile of money in 1999 (enough that they made two more Mummies) and is somehow rated 7/10 stars at IMDB. My recommendation to Hollywood: don’t entomb “The Mummy’s” film reels, lest they revive to fatally curse an unwitting future audience.