Get Ready For Some Good, Dumb Fun

by Jason R. Hewlett

It's summer once again...at least according to Hollywood. Time for movies designed more for entertainment than anything else. Time to check your brain at the door and indulge your guilty pleasures. Many of my fellow critics cringe when this season comes around, complaining at the lack of intelligence behind many of the summer's offerings of filmed entertainment but I take it for what it is. This is when we get movies for movie's sake and nothing more and, if the movies are done well and entertaining enough, I'm happy. So far so good! "Entrapment" was a fun, thrilling romp and now we've got "The Mummy," which is simply put: good, dumb fun.

This version of the film is a hi-tech remake of the 1932 Boris Karloff horror film of the same name. Actually the script, by director Stephen Sommers, is pretty much a beat for beat redo of the earlier work only with some truly cool visual effects added in by Industrial Lights and Magic. The visuals are the true star of this movie, adding to the films sense of horror and fun. The walking dead truly walk in ways that we've never seen before and thousands of flesh eating bugs consume corpses in mere seconds. It's wild stuff.

There are real people in the film too and they flesh out the Indiana Jones style plot with flair. The story follows the exploits of O'Connell, an American mercenary in 1925 Egypt played with confidence by Brendan Fraser. He's recruited by perky librarian Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) and her brother Jonathan (John Hannah) to lead them to Hamunaptra, a legendary Egyptian City of the Dead where many great treasures are said to lie waiting. Along the way the adventures face many perils but nothing so frightening as the curse that awaits those who dare plunder the city.

If all this sounds "Raiders of the Lost Ark"ish then you're right. I was very much reminded of Steven Spielberg's classic while watching this film. There are also hints of Sam Raimi's "Army of Darkness" as well but Stephen Sommers handles the hodgepodge rather well. Sure, there are more comic quips than one can shake a stick at and more thunderous action and jolts than any movie of the year but none of it is so overwhelming that it bogs the movie down. Of course, you've got to like that kind of thing. It's a B-movie done with an A-movie budget and Sommers pulls it off far better here than he did with the dreadful "Deep Rising."

As I said earlier: Brendan Fraser is really good as a reinvented Indiana Jones type hero. He's both tough and funny at the same time and it looks like he had fun making the movie. I also really enjoyed Rachel Weisz's flighty damsel in distress and John Hannah steals many laughs as her slightly disreputable brother. Of course the central character is truly the mummy, who is one part CGI corpse and another part stage actor Arnold Vosloo (so good as Lance Henrikson's sidekick in Van Damme's "Hard Target"). Vosloo is a pretty scary guy here and his mummy is played like an undead Terminator. His performance and presence work really well for the movie, creating a pretty scary villain.

If you want to have a good time with little thought involved I'd recommend "The Mummy" highly. Sit back and enjoy the summer...the heavier film fare will be back in time for fall.

8 out of 10!