The worst remake of all time (and that's saying something)...

Rating: 1/10 (18 February 2000)

My only problem with the critical loathing of the Mummy (1999) is that I am convinced that they did not dismember it enough. Therefore, I feel obligated to do such as is my duty as a movie lover. I really don't want to. But somebody's gotta, SO...here goes.
One comment that has stuck with me that I heard in the audience the night I went to see this wretched piece of celluloid is someone saying "This is like Raiders of the Lost Ark." Which it IS--minus the good parts. One would think with a budget of $80 million that they could afford to a)hire some better actors or b) write a better script. The humor, more often than not, is limp, the characterization is non-existent, all that CGI-animated sand could not hope to begin to plug the frequent plot holes, and I'm convinced that they used Boris Karloff's actual corpse in the initial scenes of the mummy being unearthed to save some money.
The film's main problem is that it cannot decide what it wants to be: action/adventure, comedy, or horror. So, by way of idiotic compromise, it tries being all three and, naturally, winds up failing miserably. The elements of the three genres mentioned above are not interchangable and I very much resent the filmmakers acting like they were. Then there's the business of the plagues of Egypt and the Book of the Dead. Excuse me, but the plagues are from Exodus, not Egyptian mythology, and, as anybody who watched the original 1932 classic upon which this is VERY loosely based, the Egyptians didn't use BOOKS. They used papyrus scrolls! And could somebody please explain to me why, if people have been looking for this city for their entire lives without finding it, it took our thoroughly brain-dead cast something like half a day to?
Probably the worst crime that this film committed was the evisceration of the character of Imhotep. Karloff portrayed him as a love-lost monster, equal parts sympathetic and repellant. Here, he's not even a blip on the radar screen, character-wise. All we mostly see is this dessicated corpse who, for some non-sensical reason, is afraid of cats (must have watched "Pet Semetary" too many times), can turn himself in a living sandstorm (which I think makes for a nice metaphor for the filmmakers; both are full of hot air), and has the most idiotic on-screen death ever captured on film. Karloff must be spinning in his grave.
Remakes, more often than not, are experiments in re-animation. While the occasional few do wind up being as good or better than the original, most such remakes are failures. Why? Because the ones doing the makeover don't understand what made the film work the first time...and don't care to. That, perhaps more than anything, is why I hate this version of the Mummy. Some things are better off dead.