Cringeworthy Indiana Jones Rip-Off

Rating: 2/10 (13 February 2007)

"The Mummy" is an embarrassing slapstick style rip-off of the Indiana Jones movies. It's not funny (though it thinks it is), it's not exciting, it's not dramatic, it's just willfully stupid.
I'd summarise the plot for you, except that this would only serve to dignify the film by suggesting it actually has a story and characters worthy of the name. In fact there are only clichés and cringeworthy stereotypes, and to make matters worse the film-makers actually seem to glory in their total lack of originality or imagination. Every scene is presented with a condescendingly postmodern nudge-nudge, wink-wink, you've seen this one before haven't you, kind of attitude, as though by gaining audience recognition of the clichés and stereotypes this somehow makes them clever.
Allegedly the action occurs in the 1920s, but actually the film scarcely even pretends to take its period setting seriously. This is not simply a matter of historical inaccuracies. The original Indiana Jones movies had plenty of those, not least in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" the mystery as to what the heck half the German army was doing in British occupied Egypt circa 1936. Yet despite such absurdities, these movies were still careful to recreate a period setting that did, however tenuously, ground them in a semblance of reality.
"The Mummy" in contrast is set in an unreal fantasy land, completely divorced from any actual time or place. Just about everything is computer generated, and it shows. I'm sure I can't be the only one who regards CGI as the emperor's new clothes. Fair enough, it can be genuinely effective when used subtly to enhance footage that has been shot in actual sets or locations. But once you start using it to create whole worlds it just winds up making everything look like a video game. Call me old-fashioned, but I always thought that the whole point of good special effects was that they should be seen and not noticed. If people come out of a movie commenting on how amazing the CGI effects were, then self-evidently they weren't amazing at all. They were rubbish, because everyone was aware of them. In the case of "The Mummy" the phoniness of the CGI only exacerbates the phoniness of the script.
As for the acting, it was generally pretty bad, although given the script that was hardly surprising. The only "character" who stood out at all was John Hannah's, and that was for entirely negative reasons. I don't usually mind Hannah, but here his character approaches Jar Jar Binks levels of obnoxiousness. Frankly I just wanted to punch his face in every time he appeared on screen. Meanwhile, Rachel Weisz looked gorgeous as ever, but that was woefully insufficient compensation for two hours of crass, cynical, cretinous drivel, passing itself off as entertainment.