Not quite Indiana Jones and the Lost City in the Sand

Rating: 6/10 (8 July 1999)

The Mummy is a bit like how Indiana Jones might have looked if Hammer had made it with a big budget. Of course, it has rather more humour than Hammer would muster but it is an American summer blockbuster. What is surprising for a summer hit is that it is coherent and has a plot, albeit a simple one.
It is 4000BC and Egypt is mighty. A great pharaoh rules and beside him his concubine, whom none but the monarch may so much as touch. Ah! But envy, lust and greed conspire against the pharaoh and he discovers his beautiful concubine trying on the head priest for size. Oh but what's this? They love each other, they say. Tough, says the pharaoh. Oops, scratch one pharaoh. Then scratch one head priest and concubine at the hands of the vengeful bodyguards. But death is not enough for the head priest. He is cursed to be the living dead.
Still here, okay, jump forward to 1929, take one ex-foreign legionnaire just in from the desert with a treasure map showing the way to an ancient Egyptian necropolis, add one fresh faced, pretty English archaeologist and her roguish brother, and send them all off to find the loot.
Of course, other parties are interested in the booty and nobody knows that amongst the loot is the cursed tomb. Right next to the loot actually. So close in fact that it is mistaken for it and the silly lot open the head priest's sarcophagus. From here on in it is monsters, chases and, rather interestingly, plagues.
The gradual regeneration of the mummy from rotting corpse to general bad character at large is a triumph of computer work - no plodding baddie wrapped in rotting bandages here, you know. Brendan Fraser's character is a bit thin but he performs well enough. Rachel Weisz is very good but then her character has a bit more, er, character. Okay, the idea is preposterous and the people only semi believable, but it is fun and has a plot. That, in the summer, is very rare indeed.