The Mummy (1999): Safe, Sufficient Camp

That you know exactly what to expect when you're walking into it is both the best and the worst thing about a pure-blooded genre film. These types of movies are made to sell tickets and give theatergoers exactly what they're paying to go see, and that's usually what you get, nothing less and irritatingly nothing more. Sometimes, genre films will try to clothe themselves in an importance designed to get you to disregard their unoriginality, and it's usually not hard to see the conflict raging in the hearts of the movies that choose such a destiny. Part of the reason The Mummy sometimes works better than it should is that it never tries to fight against its own campiness or pretend it isn't there. It wears the century-old tropes and the millennia-old subject matter it's founded on like a goofy little badge of honor, so though it never rises to the level of The Prince of Egypt or even Death on the Nile, it walks a familiar and well-trod path with pep in its step. 

Directed by Stephen Sommers, it follows a group of British treasure hunters who accidentally unleash an ancient curse, awakening everything from undead Egyptian kings to the 10 Plagues of Egypt as flawlessly as if they were actively trying to. Between their abhorrent luck and some menacing input from a group of ancient evil spirits, two particularly young and attractive treasure hunters named Rick and Evelyn are thrown together by their own story in such a way that the only possible outcomes are death or romance. If it sounds like I'm making fun of the movie as a whole, I'm really only poking fun at its near-worship of centuries-old tropes. In truth, The Mummy is a lot of fun, a safe but entertaining romp through an early 20th-century Egypt that's on a collision course with the sinister mysteries of its ancient history. It's just really elementary stuff. 

Everything you'll see here is little more than a rehash of tropes we've seen in other fantasy movies set in the Middle East, even thirty years ago at the time of this movie's release. How many times are we going to have to see a treasure-hunting party fall prey to an ancient curse? Do stories like this exist within the canon of The Mummy, and if they do, why aren't people like Rick and Evelyn reading them? This movie is unoriginal in nearly every way, down to its catch-all title: if you’ve either read a visual guide to history or seen an Indiana Jones movie, you’ve all but watched this one.

I'm inclined to judge it based on what it tries to do, and I'll certainly be doing some of that, but it only does things that have already been done, and only half as well. Its ambitions are nonexistent, and when there are so many other adventure stories set in Egypt to choose from, this one could easily get lost in the crowd. Why couldn’t I just watch Land of the Pharaohs, The Ten Commandments, or even 007’s The Spy Who Loved Me? One wonders why the filmmakers couldn't have added even one or two genre subversions to give it some distance from its own massively overcrowded genre.

However, even if its ambitions never rise above the usual Egyptian legends you see in movies, The Mummy feels like a fairytale, and scratches the same emotional itch as the stories your parents would tell you before bed when you were little. It is fantasy in its most unadulterated form, refreshingly stupendous and nonjudgmental when I was just getting used to pessimistic cultural disapproval - not that I'd refuse more of that. It is filled with white people wearing wide-brimmed hats and Arabs in long, dark cloaks, the only similarity between the two parties being their penchant for dual-wielding revolvers like they're in The Great Train Robbery. This may be a genre movie, but it wears the badge with a shocking amount of pride. Even if the confidence it has in its campiness only gets it so far, there is something admirable about its ride-or-die commitment to the idea that the old ways are sometimes better than the new, whatever your take on that.

The stakes and ambitions of this movie are both familiar and low because they're familiar, and that's not a bad thing. This is comfort-food cinema, and it's fun and reasonably well-made comfort-food cinema. It intentionally evokes the feelings that other, superior Egyptian fantasy films captured first, but in a way that feels honorable, self-aware, and campy rather than just plagiaristic. The Mummy knows it's not going to be taken too seriously, and so, for better or for worse, it never really tries to be. 

Because Sommers owns the campiness of his own story, he turns what could have been a patent creative flop into a reasonably self-aware historical fantasy. This movie is ultimately a good time, even if it steals ideas and even subject matter from other movies in its genre in a manner more brazen than even that of the ancient tomb robbers. You could hear a hundred other stories and find ideas from The Mummy that those stories brought up first. Heck, you could read the Bible and see that in some ways, it beat The Mummy to the narrative punch by about three-and-a-half thousand years. Sommers had to have known all of this, but because he embraces every last bit of this tried-and-true formula anyway, it's easier for me to do the same.

The Mummy (1999) - 7/10

Exodus 10:12-20