Spirited adventure yarn

Rating: 8/10 (13 January 2003)

Spirited adventure yarn, the (very) bare bones of which retells the classic Karloff movie from the thirties.
Fraser plays square-jawed, two-fisted hero Rick O'Connell with affable good-humour and obvious enthusiasm. Weisz plays prim librarian Evelyn Carnaham, who unwittingly releases Lord Imhotep from his eternal living death. The rest of the cast, not least Arnold Vosloo as the titular bad guy, are all equally great, not bad considering their roles are (necessarily) a collection of hackneyed stereotypes.
Were people going to accept an archaeology-based pulp yarn, necessarily crammed with referential gags and slapstick action, without pointless comparisons to Indiana Jones? Well no, but to Sommers' credit he's made room for his own creation in the homage to the pulps' genre. The movie's topped off with a rousing homage to Harryhausen's seminal battle scene from Jason and the Argonauts, here with dusty CG mummies taking the place of stop-motion skeletons. Because of this scene alone I went to see the movie a second time at the cinema. Brilliant.