The Mummy Returns (2001)

Director: Stephen Sommers

Cast: Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, Arnold Vosloo, Dwayne Johnson

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

Did I Like It: I don’t think I’m being excessively controversial by saying the special effects of The Mummy (1999) don’t really hold up nearly twenty-five years later*. Every time a scarab or a group scene large than fifteen appears on screen, the film begins to resemble a cut scene from an era of video games that might have worked then, but feels quaint now. And yet, that film acquitted itself better than average by being just charming enough in a desert of Indiana Jones films**, that it’s flaws could forgiven, if not completely ignored in service of a good time.

The same cannot be said for The Mummy Returns. The film is rather infamous—if only in my own memory—nearly to a level of Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (1987) for having special effects that could not hold up even at the time of initial viewing. The final battle with the Scorpion King (Rock, in his film debut) was such a clunky master’s class in running afoul of the uncanny valley, that it looked—at best—like a cut scene from a Playstation 1 game at a time where we had all moved on to our Playstations 2. Now, nearly ever special effect appears to be a work in progress which subsequently ran out of money.

Are the film’s effects so obnoxious that the film sputters from distraction to distraction? Or are the charms contained within diminished so that the film cannot surpass its flaws?Indeed, in those sequences which don’t use CGI, there might be just enough charm for me to try and relax. But Fraser’s impishness is on the wane and Weisz’s delightful nerd waif of the first film shifts into a far more standard and less surprising heroine. The effects might be bad enough, or the charm might be lacking, but I tend to think its both.

*I may have made this reference, and forgive my increasingly aging mind if I had, but excuse me while I realize I must have drunk from the wrong Grail. I know, wrong movie.

**We’re arguably still in the middle of that desert, but back then even the prospect of another Indy movie after Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) was far from guaranteed. I know, I know. Wrong movie.

The Mummy (1999)

Director: Stephen Sommers

Cast: Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah, Arnold Vosloo

Have I Seen it Before: 1999 was a strange time. All we wanted was a fourth Indiana Jones movie. Until that film finally came around to fulfill its inevitable level of disappointment, we’d take practically anything with archaeologists and deserts and long scenes where square-jawed heroes wield torches.

That’s where this movie comes in.

Did I Like It: Where Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) took the trappings of the B-movie and made them with the best possible tools—from special effects, to cinematography, to actors, stunt work, all the way to music—and redefined what a-list entertainment, this very-thin remake of the Boris Karloff classic is content to eschew those ambitions and do something most films couldn’t and wouldn’t dare:

It’s just a B movie. There are a few run-of-the-mill desert sequences that reach for epic, but much of this feels like it was shot in a studio, and not a terribly impressive one, at that. The CGI creatures only kind of worked over twenty years ago. And while Brendan Fraser is an amiable screen presence (who should have been afforded the opportunity to work more then and now), I think even he would agree with you that he doesn’t have the charisma of a Harrison Ford.

But, is there not some degree of delight in the fluff that comes with being a B-movie? What’s wrong with being a B-movie? Plenty of prestige entertainments are positively turgid, and I would certainly rather re-watch this movie than the vast majority of supposedly more considered festival screeners I have to watch.

At least it avoided that unbelievable awful b-team Nintendo-64 cartridge CGI that they broke out for The Rock in The Mummy Returns (2001).

Now that I’ve thought about it, that first thought I had about Raiders being the b-movie perfected, and this movie just being a modern B-movie may be a little unfair. The Mummy features a score by Jerry Goldsmith, and if it’s controversial to think that Goldsmith is just as good as John Williams, then I will happily be a lightning rod for that controversy.