Gosh, it’s ridiculously bad! The beetles are fake, and only the sand faces are effective. The special effects are pretty bad, with Vosloo’s stretchy jaw being the worst offender. The rest of the characters are all one-dimensional stereotypes and not worth bothering with. Brendan Fraser is also okay as the brainless Indiana Jones-type explorer, and he’s good in the action scenes. John Hannah is a bit better as a timid, weak coward type, and to be fair I found myself liking him. Look, nobody speaks English like this and the portrayal borders on stereotypical. Worst of all she’s British, and her grating accent soon becomes apparent. Rachel Weisz is a bad actress and therefore well suited to this film, she fits in nicely. The regeneration moments are okay, but Arnold Vosloo is not exactly a frightening person, and his naked torso and eye make up just make him look like a drag queen in his/her finest silk dressing gown. It’s just ludicrous and downright embarrassing. The mummy makes scary faces like it’s in a Disney film, so that also ruins any frights there might have been.
The original form is fine, but then some idiot had to give it eyes and a tongue so it could talk, ruining the effect.
Unfortunately, the mummy itself is most disappointing. The action scenes are probably the best thing the film has to offer, and Fraser leaping about firing two handguns is enjoyable enough. The ten plagues are understated (a fountain runs red to show ‘rivers running with blood’ – talk about disappointing) and merely an excuse for more special effects, briefly done. A variation on the black slime from THE X-FILES turns up in the form of a flesh-burrowing scarab beetle in an amusing scene, but the effects of the beetles never look for a moment convincing – they look like exactly what they are, computer graphics. The 12 certificate means there is virtually no blood in the film, so the deaths are not very good, and those which are left to the imagination are the most effective. There is little plot, with the film merely being a string of action sequences, so many that it’s hard to label this film horror at all. The ‘actors’ are required to run around and react to various pyrotechnic or computer generated effects, and that’s exactly it. Sadly there is little acting in this film, and what there is instead is atrocious comedy filler which is recycled and totally lame in concept. Forget about the original MUMMY film for a start, as it had Boris Karloff in it.
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