Great Saturday morning cinema.

Rating: 9/10 (29 June 1999)

There is a new Indiana Jones and his name is Mr O'Connell. The Mummy is an action/adventure/comedy in the best tradition of Saturday morning cinema and it does not miss a trick. A dash of horror/suspense will not have you white nuckled to your seat unless you found the episode in First Contact scary where Picard was chasing Borg through the darkened decks of his ship. This is strictly; tongue in cheek, rip roaring high adventure.
Eventually we will become blase about all these special effects especially if they continue to be thrown at us with the abandon present in this movie. I expected that I had seen most of the FX in the trailer but there were lots more. I expected to see perhaps a dozen undead monsters that were computer (re)generated but there were scores of them and all beautifully realised. I didn't expect to see our hero in a melee with those recently reanimated, wrong again. It's all very clever, I love it and I wonder how long it will be before a whole movie is created in the computer with the actors cut in from simple (and cheap) green room set filming.
Another thought occurs to me: are all the studios protecting themselves against the new Star Wars film? "If Lucas is going to have lots of FX then we ought to too. Let's make our own FX filled movie so we don't get left behind." So we are treated to Matrix one week and Mummy the next soon to be followed by Wild Wild West before The Phantom Menace has a chance to blow our socks off with its own computer wizardry.
Regardless of the motive for making this film it is a cracking way to spend a couple of hours in the dark. Go on, spend a fiver, you know you want to.