Dreamlife of Angels | Lovers of the Arctic Circle | The Mummy
hero with a sense of humor, a beautiful, intelligent heroine, a lost city full of treasure, an ancient curse, and some great cinematography. So why does this exercise feel like a Spielberg movie as scripted by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandell and directed by Frank Oz?
Brendan Fraser is amusing as American adventurer Rick O'Connell, first seen as a member of the French Foreign Legion in 1923 Egypt. He certainly has the square-jawed look of the hard-headed hero, with a disarming grin that removes some of the character's potential pomposity. But the script short-cuts O'Connell's feats of derring-do (he's a crack shot, just accept it) in favor of quips, double-takes, and a Thriller meets Jason and the Argonauts climax.
Rachel Weisz suffers her own share of slapstick misfortune (in her first scene, she single-handedly dominoes a library into chaos) as amateur Egyptologist Evelyn Carnarvon. Her path crosses O'Connell's when her brother, Jonathan (John Hannah), nicks an artifact off the adventurer. It contains a map to the lost city of Hammurabi, the City of the Dead, said to be filled with treasure and protected by a legendary curse. The threesome find themselves in a race against four American fortune-hunters to find the city, loot the treasure and haul it home. Weisz has her own goal, to find a long-lost spellbook that connects the present with the myth-laden past.
Had this latest update of the Universal horror monster included some of the tragedy of past stories, perhaps director/screenwriter Stephen Sommers (Deep Rising, The Jungle Book) would have ended up with a better movie. The tragic attraction between monster and victim, the tragic bond between hero and villain, none of this is present in this joky joyride in the desert. The mummy, when he finally does appear (nearly an hour into the movie), is a CGI cartoon character, condemned to absorbing body parts from unwilling victims. Arnold Vosloo inhabits the CGI effects with a commanding presence for the most part, convincing us in the prologue and in later scenes that he could be a memorable screen villain. But instead, he's merely a symbol for evil, calling down the ten biblical plagues (odd, considering the plagues were God's way of punishing the Pharaoh for not releasing the Jews) as part of his curse.
Most offensive, however, are the stereotypes that riddle the script. Nearly all of the Egyptians depicted in the movie are mindless sheep, greedy opportunists, mysterious cultists, or
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