a nice old-fashioned adventure yarn

Rating: Null/10 (21 June 1999)

This is summertime fun as it used to be. It's a pleasant change to see a movie where the story and characters are not completely swamped by special effects. It's nice to meet familiar types again, deftly touched up for the nineties, but not so much to make them ludicrous in a 1920s setting: a hero who's smart but not smart-aleck, a heroine who seems fluffy but grows with the task in hand, a brother who's a charming wastrel not a cad, self-important opponents, and even two of the natives (who normally just serve as wallpaper) get their moment of glory, the Curator with a valiant rearguard action usually reserved for some upstanding Yank, and the Tribal chief. We would have loved to see more of him, but somebody must have had a shrewd notion he would have walked away with the movie in the face of its official hero. The Mummy is just what I expected, an old-fashioned adventure yarn where you want to see well-known characters and situations. That's the purpose of genre movies, to deliver variations on a set theme, and the Mummy delivers in spades. Anybody who expected something else should blame Universal's marketing division. Why do they always get their strategies wrong?