In short: The Mummy Returns (2001)

Some of what I said about the first Stephen Sommers The Mummy movie still goes. At the time when he made this sequel, he certainly still knew how to stage a series of awesome and escalating action set pieces created with CGI before CGI was automatically good looking once you’ve got a certain budget, and he also still realized he needed to ground the loud stuff in the human (though of course not the naturalistic), so we do join Rick and Evie (still Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz) as a still adventuring wife and husband duo with an only mildly obnoxious kid (Freddie Boath), the film really getting how you’d want things to have worked out for these two, boring realism be damned.

Sommers also hasn’t lost his feel for breakneck pacing, though the sequel’s middle part is a bit flabbier, though not terribly so, than the one of the first. That’s mostly on account of Sommers’s script containing quite a bit of backstory and side material that needs to somehow be provided to the audience. As a matter of personal taste, I’m not terribly fond of the whole rebirth and chosen one subplot for our heroic couple – I’d rather see people kick the bad guy’s ass because they are competent and heroic and willing to do the right thing instead of fated to do it – but I have to admit, the finale does use all of the elements Sommers has built before rather well, giving the whole silly affair a surprising feeling of the organic with an internal logic of its own, while also including enough awesome goofy nonsense like Egyptian pygmy mummies. Again, the film goes out of its way to have every character do something of import, giving the whole affair a surprisingly inclusive bent, too.


The script isn’t as dumb as it pretends to be in other regards too. At the very least, the film very consciously builds up a contrast between a healthy Big Love as embodied by Evie and Rick and the rather destructive one between Imhotep (still Arnold Vosloo) and Anck-Su-Namun (Patricia Velasquez). It’s not terribly deep, but it’s neither dumb nor hollow either, and that’s really the thing that surprises me most about Sommers’s Mummy movies when watched fairly: they may be big dumb fun, but they are not stupid.

Three Films Make A Post: Adventure lives forever.

Torque (2004): In 2004, the fast cars and macho men sub-genre was already big enough in mainstream cinema, the hipster impulse to do them ironically could not be supressed. To wit, Torque, as directed by Joseph Kahn, a film that spends the whole of its running time pointing out how stupid and lame it is, which indeed it is very much. As all films of this ilk, it never attempts to do anything but point out its own failures, never bothering to, just for example, not be stupid. That, I can’t help but assume, would take effort, whereas empty irony clearly does not. The end result is a film that will neither entertain an audience coming for a fast cars and macho men movie – because an un-ironic film of that genre would at the very least attempt to not be aggressively shite – nor one perhaps expecting an actual parody of the genre, which, again, would take effort this film just isn’t in the mood to make.

Van Helsing (2004): After realizing the error of my ways regarding Stephen Sommers’s Mummy movies, I had high hopes of recognizing Van Helsing as another film I had unfairly maligned. Well, I shouldn’t have worried my pretty little head, because Van Helsing is even worse than Torque above, foregoing the empty irony for some of the worst jokes in film history. As if the jokes weren’t painful enough, Sommers also manages to get a completely lifeless performance out of Hugh Jackman, pairing him up with the typically wooden Kate Beckinsale until a negative number of romantic sparks fly. Somehow, Sommers also lost the ability to stage fun and exciting action sequences, of pacing a movie, and of being rather clever while pretending to be really dumb. Because that’s clearly not bad enough, we also get Richard Roxburgh as the what I believe to be worst Dracula in movie history (porn Draculas not excepted)  giving a performance that’s so bad, the mind boggles what anyone involved was thinking (if anyone was indeed thinking and not just snorting coke).


Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (1991): But let’s end this post on a movie that isn’t obnoxiously bad, Craig Baldwin’s collage pseudo-documentary that tells the horrible history of US “intervention” in various Latin American countries. The film avoids the preachiness as well as the dry didacticism that could come with this kid of topic by pretending to be a right-wing conspiracist screed telling the tale of the heroic US fight against evil aliens and their co-conspirators, hilariously imitating the tone of the looniest parts of conspiracy theorist thinking, obviously mostly setting it into picture via footage taken from older SF and horror movies, saying what it actually has to say by inversion. Which manages to make the film funny and inventive as well as informative; given my predilections, the particular footage the film uses adds to the enjoyment, of course.

In short: The Mummy (1999)

Growing into one’s middle age is a curious and sometimes disturbing process. Case in point: one day, you wake up and find that you have actually grown to like Stephen Sommers’s The Mummy rather a lot – a film you’ve held up as a great example of really dumb and incompetent blockbuster filmmaking for nearly two decades. Worse still, I’d even call the film pretty damn good instead of just “entertaining”. Clearly, either wisdom or a slow decay of mental faculties comes with age. At least I still have Michael Bay to look down upon.

But seriously, if you go in expecting to see all kinds of silly nonsense, and stop taking yourself so damn seriously (I may or may not be speaking to myself) Sommers’s Mummy is the epitome of an effective and charming, efficiently and really rather cleverly written big loud entertainment. Sommers, while certainly not a visual artist, makes the best out of all the glories late 90s CGI can buy, and puts his characters through one exciting and pretty damn awesome action sequence after the next.

However, director and film never forget that you do need some human grounding to your awesome spectacle, so they treat the romance between hero Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) and heroine-librarian Evie Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) not just to get a checkmark on the list of mandatory plot elements, but as if they actually meant it. It may not be a deep, believable portray of actual human romantic interaction, but the film is full of the sort of snappy, glowing banter between lovers old Hollywood loved, resulting in a leading couple you actually root for during the film’s breathless series of set pieces. Which is only right and proper, giving how old Hollywood the film’s obvious other influences also are.

Adding to the film’s huge charm is how many things of import it actually lets characters do who aren’t the male lead, so Evie actually does quite a bit more than your typical blockbuster heroine (that Weisz is charming as all get-out while actually doing shit is certainly not to the film’s detriment either), Evie’s comic relief brother John Hannah never becomes obnoxious and useless as is tradition, and the traditional brown sidekick (Oded Fehr) might even be the actual hero of the piece.


Honestly, I have no idea what was wrong with me not liking this one.