A brainless, yet entertaining popcorn movie

Rating: Null/10 (1 May 2000)

To paraphrase Roger Ebert in his review of this film, I have really no legitimate grounds on which to recommend this movie... except the fact that I liked it. Yes, the dialog is cornball, most of the acting is unremarkable at best, and there's no emotional core to speak of. But it doesn't matter, in this kind of film. This is a film that only takes itself seriously in its amazing action sequences, and its visual effects, and even then it's often done in a tongue-in-cheek manner. This is a film that knows it's not meant to be entertaining on more than the basest of levels, and it does that with flying colors. This is the kind of movie where the actors are supposed to be second banana to the visual effects, and while I sometimes don't condone such films (the '98 Godzilla comes to mind) if they're successful enough in tapping into my sense of imagination and adventure, it can work. I mean, the scenes with the unformed Mummy himself, the guards that come out of the wall carving, or the giant sand storm are visually stunning and imaginative. So much so that I really don't care that there isn't an original line of dialog in the entire film. "The Mummy" is the Mortal Kombat movie with an Indiana Jones motif, and it doesn't pretend to be anything else.