Josh Spiegel
Trying to ape an Indiana Jones movie by mimicking its common elements is easy enough. Set the story in the early half of the 20th century, ideally in the early 1930s. Create an adventure set in the middle of Asia or Africa, and ensure that it has vague roots in real-life history. Cast a handsome American who can quip comfortably. Ensure that there’s plenty of action, and guarantee a climax with cartoonishly outrageous death scenes for the bad guys.
But mimicking the tropes doesn’t mean an Indy riff can work well. Twenty-five years ago, with his remake of The Mummy, writer/director Stephen Sommers managed to pull off a near-magic trick of a Spielbergian homage, less because of his careful writing and more because he hit the casting jackpot twice.
Just as you can’t clone Harrison Ford (no matter how hard Hollywood may try), it’s difficult to find a pair as charming as Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. As much as Indiana Jones is a standard-bearer of modern action, Ford was only well matched on screen by his female counterpart in Raiders of the Lost Ark with Karen Allen. In The Mummy, Fraser, as American adventurer Rick O’Connell, has a delightful chemistry with Weisz, as the shy and intelligent librarian Evelyn Carnahan. O’Connell is, unlike Indy, not even slightly professorial. He’s a hard-bitten ex-French Foreign Legion fighter with first-hand knowledge of the eponymous mummy, a high priest on the hunt for his true love, the future bride of the Pharaoh. Evelyn is a bookish type whose caddish brother enlists her and eventually O’Connell to take part in an adventure to go to the mummy’s resting place in the Egyptian City of the Dead in the hopes of becoming wildly rich.
Murderous and terrifying hijinks (naturally) ensue, but the key to the film has always been the combination of Fraser and Weisz. At the time, Fraser was more well-known than Weisz, having proved his comic-himbo chops in everything from Encino Man to George of the Jungle. Though Fraser easily pulls off the matinee-idol looks in The Mummy, his comic timing is a secret weapon. One of the film’s best running gags involves O’Connell’s love-hate (mostly hate) relationship with a slimy cohort of his (Kevin O’Connor), with our hero getting mileage out of childishly attacking Beni. And Fraser’s chemistry with Weisz is immediate and extremely convincing. (It’s far more than the eventual revelation here that when Evelyn takes off her glasses and lets down her hair, she’s – gasp! – outrageously beautiful.)
There are so many reasons why The Mummy shouldn’t work – aside from being a very obvious Indy riff, it’s a remake of a classic horror film that partially seems to exist simply so Universal could shake off the dust from a piece of intellectual property. (Like what they did with the execrable Tom Cruise vehicle from 2017.) While reviews were mixed-to-positive, the box office was resoundingly successful; the film raked in over $150 million domestically. Of course, while its success led to a 2001 sequel, The Mummy Returns, Sommers couldn’t catch lightning twice. Many of the players from the original showed up again, including Fraser, Weisz, and Arnold Vosloo, and yet the bombastic action is a shaky cover-up for a lack of winning charm and humor. It’s not that The Mummy ‘99 only worked outside of its action sequences, but the sequel is an aggressive and slightly early example of how overreliance on special effects can ruin a film. (It’s easy to laugh at the horrendous CGI on Dwayne Johnson in his Scorpion King getup now, but even in 2001, the design was atrocious.)
In the intervening quarter-century, both Fraser and Weisz have won Oscars, and at least one of those was deserved. (That Fraser is having a recent boost in his career is wonderful, and he did exactly what he was asked to do in The Whale, but… uh… hey, at least he was in Killers of the Flower Moon.) Although critics weren’t uniformly in love with The Mummy, it’s a film that Millennials and Gen Z have glommed onto in strange ways, like this bumper sticker that both stars eventually commented upon. (This writer can confirm – it’s a nice bumper sticker.) Sometimes, you get dealt a lucky hand as a filmmaker, and Stephen Sommers got dealt the luckiest possible hand in 1999. Though The Mummy is not as good as the original trio of Indiana Jones films, it does boast two impossibly charming and gorgeous leads at different stages of movie stardom. In some ways, The Mummy, an unabashedly B-movie-style blend of action, comedy, romance, and horror, is a quintessential summer movie, offering exactly the right kind of goofy fun for the warmest time of year.
“The Mummy” is streaming on Peacock and available for digital rental or purchase.
