Robogeek vomits out his feelings on THE MUMMY below. Feel free to check out my review in the 'REVIEW' section, or... don't trust me or Robogeek at all and read Moriarty and Father Geek's reviews. So far the AICN crew is a bit split on this one. Here's Robo...
ROBOGEEK TAKES A WHIFF OF "THE MUMMY"
(From the director of "Deep Rising.")
Im-ho-tep...
Im-ho-tep...
Im-ho-tep...
Huh? What? Was I chanting again? Damn, I'll have to call Dr. Hikita.
Anyway, I'm back from taking a sniff of "The Mummy," and it smelled like, well..., cheese.
Which isn't to say that it's as bad as the "Variety" review said it was. But it is certainly nowhere near as good as Moriarty reported, either. (Are you on crack?)
The Mummy is really kinda cool, but "The Mummy" veers between being mildly frustrating and gleefully ridiculous. (If that sentence didn't make sense to you, read it again.)
I liked this movie, though early on I wasn't sure I would. It sorta won me over when all was said and done - barely. It's a moderately entertaining Saturday matinee confection that could've been a great and timeless classic, or at least kicked a lot more ass.
After the ooo- and ahhh-inducing opening shot, there's a relatively brief set-up in the form of a prologue which takes place in ancient Egypt. (Nevermind that none of these people actually look like Egyptians.) Basically, we get the origin of the eponymous Mummy in a nutshell of paint-by-numbers narrative exposition. This was the first of many occassions that my interior dialogue uttered "ho-hum" while I watched the film.
The narrative becomes profoundly clunky and self-conscious in the first act, which shifts to 1920's Egypt, where the rest of the film takes place. We are introduced to each of the primary characters by way of hit-you-over-the-head exposition that is uniformly awkward, and swings randomly between boring and charming. I found myself thinking it'd be far less intrusive if the actors simply wore big signs around their necks containing all this same information in nice big block type. During the first act, I kept going back and forth trying to decide whether the film was self-aware of how ridiculously it was unfolding, or whether it was just unintentionally stiff.
And herein lies one of my basic problems with the film: it never finds its groove. It fact, it literally wanders the desert looking for it. Every once in a while, its search yields a cool moment, a neat scene, an earned laugh, and an almost scare - all hinting at the movie's true (but unrealized) potential. But more often than not, it just doesn't click. It lacks that magic, that spark, that certain something that made films like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad" classics that you can watch a hundred times and never grow tired of. (I honestly don't think I could sit through this movie a second time.)
This is largely a matter of tone. The tone of the film seems to be attached to a pendulum, which first swings between taking-itself-(too-)seriously and then tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek... only to then veer into recklessly-broad-and-cheesy-abandon (and back-and-forth again).
I got this feeling that the film was trying to be (at least) two different movies, and not succeeding at being great at either one. On the one hand, the film shows some aspirations to be a send-up of the old Universal monster movies - and I think if it had made a concerted and focused effort in that direction, the film could have succeeded gloriously. But instead, there is a part of the film that Wants To Be Taken Seriously and be a "real" horror adventure, though it never fully rises to the occasion.
Which leads me to another of my basic problems with the film: the characters lack the dimension to be emotionally resonant. They're cartoony caricatures that I simply couldn't get invested in. At all. We never really get to know them. Actually, the character we perhaps best get to know is Rachel Weisz' geek-girl Evelyn, a sort of male-fantasy librarian who periodically evokes some real charm. But too many of the characters are simply cardboard cut-outs - especially the rival American archaeologists, who are all portrayed as astonishingly stupid. Most confounding is Kevin O'Connor's Benny, who has a wildly erratic accent that bounces around throughout the film.
You could literally spend days nitpicking this film. Like why, for instance, does Evelyn suddenly stop needing glasses after the first act? WHY? The film is littered with little logic questions like this that clutter the narrative, and prove incessantly annoying.
But let's face it, the real reason to see this film is the effects work by ILM, much of which - particularly the Mummy itself - is absolutely fantastic. It's just too bad the film itself doesn't rise to the level its effects do. And by the third act, the film finally cuts loose a little and has fun, which is a relief and a reward, not to mention fun.
(A private aside here, for a moment, as I go off on a little tangent: for some strange reason, my favorite scenes in the last two movies I've seen - "The Mummy" and "Go" - have involved cats. Very, very odd.)
I walked out of the film with a very simple question etched in the forefront of my mind - why the hell hasn't contemporary Hollywood turned out a real action-horror-adventure film that KICKS ASS? The projects exist - like "I Am Legend," "Hellboy" (or any del Toro project, for that matter), and as-yet-unadapted material like "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen." Projects with real characters who leap off the page, in gripping contexts. There is a huge untapped market for this films of this genre done right. The audience is hungry for them.
"The Mummy" is merely an appetizer.
- Robogeek
