Pathetic

Rating: Null/10 (29 March 2002)

I was thoroughly let down by this movie. I couldn't even enjoy it for it's camp value. Campy horror is when you're supposed to be scared by the monster and you can clearly see the zipper on the back of the suit. Once you get computer-generated beetles crawling under people's skin, looking genuinely real, it's not campy, it's just sick.
The plot involves a group of extremely stupid people going into the city of the dead, Hamunaptra. There's semi-geeky Evie, her goofy and greedy brother Jonathan, and there's our "hero" Rick, played by Brendan Fraser. He apparently thinks he's Harrison Ford, because he keeps acting like a rip-off of Indiana Jones, made worse by the fact that Fraser cannot act. Evie despises Rick, which you know means by the end of the film they'll be passionately in love with each other. There's a group of five typically rude and extra stupid Americans that decide to race our heros to the tomb. Between these two groups of stupid people, they unleash Imhotep, a head priest who was mummified alive and cursed so that if he were ever awakened, the world would suffer ten plagues. By now the stupid people are becoming overwhelming, so the movie starts killing them off one by one.
This movie seems to have spent a lot of time plotting gruesome deaths for it's characters. I can just imagine a meeting of the screenwriters, where they're all trying to outdo each other with the most sickening idea that won't go over a PG-13. They probably spent more time on this than the rest of the plot. Well, that and writing aciton sequences that are more laughable than thrilling. Also, hundreds of innocent people are killed or hurt by all these plagues, and while our heros are "good" for going after the mummy, why does the movie never address that their actions had such far-reaching consequences?