The Mummy (1999)
Some films exist purely to make you grin like an idiot, and The Mummy is one of them. There's a moment early on where Brendan Fraser's Rick O'Connell, outnumbered, outgunned, and about to be executed in the middle of the desert, still manages to look like he's having the time of his life. That's the whole film right there. It's not trying to be Lawrence of Arabia. It's trying to be the most fun you can have for two hours, and it largely succeeds.
Rick is a disgraced soldier turned treasure hunter who stumbles headlong into ancient curses and undead Egyptian priests, which, honestly, fair enough, seems like an occupational hazard. The villain is Imhotep, played by Arnold Vosloo with a gloriously unhinged commitment to melodrama, all rotting flesh, telekinetic sand and screaming plagues. He's not frightening exactly, but he is enormously entertaining to watch. Alongside Fraser, you've got Rachel Weisz as Evelyn, a brilliantly nerdy librarian-turned-adventurer who manages to be both the cleverest person in the room and somehow always falling into trouble, and John Hannah as her brother Jonathan, stealing every single scene he wanders into with a cowardly charm that never gets old. It's a classic mismatched trio, and the chemistry between the three of them is what keeps the whole thing moving even when the plot is doing something completely daft.
Now, look. The CGI hasn't aged well. That's just the truth of it. The digital scarabs look like they were rendered on a dial-up connection by someone who'd only just discovered what computers were. The swirling sand-face version of Imhotep has the texture of a screensaver. You can see the seams everywhere. But here's the thing: it genuinely doesn't matter, because the film is moving so fast and having so much fun that you don't have time to sit and nitpick the effects. Director Stephen Sommers knows exactly what kind of film he's making, leans hard into the camp, and keeps the pace relentless. There's always another set piece, another one-liner, another absurd supernatural threat bearing down on our heroes before you've even caught your breath from the last one.
It's drawing from the classic adventure serials of the 30s and 40s, that pulpy, Raiders-adjacent spirit where the hero survives on charm and luck more than skill, and the romance is more screwball than swooning. The love story between Rick and Evelyn is goofy and sweet in equal measure, built on banter rather than grand declarations, which suits the tone perfectly. Nobody here is playing it for keeps. They're playing it for laughs, for thrills, for the sheer joy of it.
It's not deep. It's not scary, despite the horror trappings. It is absolutely not accurate history, and anyone who needs it to be is watching the wrong film. What it is, though, is endlessly rewatchable. I've seen it more times than I can count and I'd watch it again tomorrow without a second thought. That kind of effortless rewatchability is rarer than it looks. Plenty of films from that late-90s blockbuster era feel exhausting now, bloated and self-important. This one still feels breezy.
Is it a great film? No, not in any serious critical sense. The plotting is loose, the logic is basically non-existent, and it's asking you to switch your brain off fairly early on. But it earns every bit of the cult status it's built up over the years. Brendan Fraser is magnetic in a way that Hollywood criminally underused for too long, and the whole ensemble is just having an absolute blast. When a film this gleefully unpretentious gets everything it's aiming for right, that counts for a lot.
Three and a half stars. Flawed by almost any standard you care to apply, but bursting with heart, humour, and heroics. A guilty pleasure that's barely guilty at all.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from the 1990s: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Heat (1995), Carlito's Way (1993)
