Im Ho Hum

Rating: Null/10 (2 October 1999)

I have some big problems with this movie.
It's not the overall jokiness of it all... although I wish it had been a little more substantial, given that it suggests that Christians, Jews and Muslims have been wrong about the whole afterlife deal, and that the world is controlled by animal-headed deities. That's a different issue.
I'm also willing to admit some of the FX were jaw-dropping. The wall of sand, for example. But there were other "jaw-dropping" moments, too -- for instance, the "jokes": my mouth hung open (wider than the Mummy's) in astonishment, but no laughter came out. Next, there's the appalling racism of the screenplay: the Egyptians are at one point compared (unfavorably) to their camels. The only time we really get to see the non-Anglo inhabitants of Cairo, they're shown as a mob of fanatic zombies. And don't even get me started on Beni...
Then there's the technical errors. Big ones. It's amazing that the equally shoddy "Godzilla (1998)" was torn to shreds by audiences for its every inaccuracy, while this movie wasn't. Here are some examples:
-- Brandon Fraser is wandering into the Sahara, with no horse, no water, nothing. "The desert will kill him," says the mysterious Arab, watching from the cliffs. Next, a subtitle: Three Years Later. Brandon's alive in Cairo. No explanation is given for his miraculous survival. This is known as "cheating". The mysterious Arab pulls a similar stunt at the end of the movie.
-- Egyptian books. The "codex", our modern book with pages, covers and a binding, is a recent European invention. Egyptian "books" would have been papyrus sheets, not big volumes bound on the left!
-- The Mummy steals the eyes of a man who's nearly blind, yet somehow manages to see perfectly clearly.
-- The Plagues of Egypt?? Those were supposed to have been sent by the Old Testament God of the Hebrews, weren't they??
-- It's bad enough that they wasted the talents of Bernard Fox as pure Mummy-fodder, but... did they have to have him crash *exactly* on top of a spot of quicksand??!!
-- How is it that the wastrel brother, described in the beginning as an indifferent Egyptologist, suddenly reads hieroglyphics and hieratic fairly well? (And here's a minor quibble: I find it hard to believe these turn-of-the-century English types could read ancient Egyptian clearly and correctly enough for the Gods to understand...)
-- Simple question: where did those fully-saddled camels come from at the end?
-- Why does the mysterious Arab THANK Fraser et al. for helping to clean up the mess that they themselves created? You'd figure he'd chase them away and warn 'em never to come back, on pain of death. After all, look at all the people and historic monuments that have been destroyed because of those foreign grave-robbers!
OK, enough. This movie is the cinematic equivalent of a Circus Peanut: it seemed like a harmless bit of fluff, but left a really bad taste in my mouth.