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.