What's The Movie About?
Two siblings discover a map to the ancient Egyptian city of the dead, and they rescue Brendan Fraser to take them there. When they arrive, they accidently awaken a thousand year old priest who brings curses to the land and tries to kidnap the female main character to bring his girlfriend back to life.
Y'know. The usual stuff.
What I Like.
This is an action comedy, and the best thing about the movie is the action, and the comedy. The action is fun, frenetic, and exciting. And a lot of the time the comedy is beautifully integrated as well. I've heard people say this movie is unintentionally funny, which I don't know what they hell they are talking about. All the comedy is witty, quick, and obviously intended. Beni is a perfect foil to the good guys and I was actually kinda sad he died, even though he's a slimy bastard. Speaking of which, all the characters are kind of terrible, but I love them all. Brendan Fraser is such an interesting actor, especially now days. I feel like you don't see a lot of actors doing both Oscar-appealing dramas like the Whale at the same time as weird conceptual nerd-bait like Doom Patrol. I really like the Evie character too. I like that she's smart, and even though she's a damsel in distress, uses her position to trick Imhotep and distract him. Speaking of which, I love the guy playing Imhotep. He has so many smarmy facial expressions, I love him. It's a pretty impressive performance as well, since it's almost entirely a physical one. (Actually, all his lines are a dubbed over monster voice, so maybe it is an entirely physical performance.) I also really liked Winston. There should be more characters like him.
What I Don't Like.
It's been said a million times, but the CGI in this movie is pretty bad. It's so bad even I can tell it sucks. Moving swiftly along, this movie is also really stupid. Mostly in a fun way, I might add. But if you start thinking about almost any part of it, the plot, character motivations, and mechanics of the mummy's curse swiftly fall apart. I don't like that Imhotep is afraid of cats. That's just dumb. If it played into his final defeat, like a horde of cats is what kills him, it would have been better. Finally, the movie is kinda racist. I think. Maybe? I'm actually not sure. They didn't hire any actual Egyptians to play any of the characters, but they did hire some non-white actors to play the Egyptians and this did come out 25 years ago so eeehhh... The Medjai are the most competent and badass characters in the movie, but the movie also opens with a bunch of white guys shooting hundreds of jabbering locals so eeeeeehhhhhh... Beni is a sleezy French thief but he's also shown to be really cunning and the second or third smartest person in the plot so eeeeeeeeehhhhhhhhh... Just to be safe I'm going to assume it's racist. Not maliciously so, but that's still not great. Also Rachel Weisz sort of gets sexually assaulted like 3 times and the movie plays it off, so that's also not great.
Final Summation.
Yeah the movie is really stupid, but I had a lot of fun! I think it should be clear at this point that I am a simple dude. I see fun action with charismatic heroes and funny quips, I will like. It is totally better than Phantom Menace. (Which I mention not only because movie-goers in 1999 said the same thing, but also because Phantom Menace is being rereleased in like 2 days at time of writing and I'm not watching it because I've seen it before and it sucks.)
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