Twenty-five years ago, action-adventure maestro Stephen Sommers had a big summer hit on his hands; as writer and director he had revived the renowned Universal Studios scary-movie brand as a fun family film in the Indiana Jones style. Arnold Vosloo had the role that Boris Karloff played in the 1930s: Imhotep, the high priest bandaged up for death by mummification on account of his treachery in ancient Egypt and accidentally brought back from the undead thousands of years later by romantic adventurers and scamps of the 20th century’s Jazz Age, seeking excitement and enlightenment in Egypt.
But our heroes are scholar and librarian Evelyn Carnahan, played by Rachel Weisz, her madcap brother Jonathan (John Hannah), their roguish guide Gad Hassan (Omid Djalili) and, most importantly, dashing American soldier of fortune Rick O’Connell, played by the unbearably handsome young Brendan Fraser, who knows where the legendary city of the dead, Hamunaptra, is to be found. The movie became a trilogy with two more films, and was even revived with Tom Cruise in the American adventurer role.
The Mummy is cheerful, good-natured and entertaining and its cast did engagingly silly things like ride camels through the desert; though the film relies on some dodgy stereotypes, not really palatable despite the 1920s setting. It also mixed live-action and digital fabrication for set-pieces which would now naturally be entirely digital; in fact the franchise involved more and more green-screen work as it continued. It has enormous flair and attack, and it’s an old-fashioned, if paradoxically unadventurous adventure, an anti-Ishtar of box office success.
But in many ways it is impossible to look back on this film except through the poignant lens of Fraser’s own life: the injuries and illnesses brought on by doing a lot of his own stunts on the Mummy films, the deceleration of his career after the franchise ended, and his depression due to a sexual assault in 2003 by the president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association: an ugly and chaotic incident which as much as anything utterly discredited the HFPA and forced it to reform. And then there was Fraser’s amazing comeback in Darren Aronofsky’s 2022 drama The Whale, giving an Oscar-winning performance which channelled both his personal pain and played to the audience’s growing sympathy for him.
What emerges so strongly from The Mummy is the irony: Fraser’s Rick is supposed to be the wised-up tough guy who knows all the angles, whereas Weisz’s sweet ingenue and Hannah’s goofy Wodehousian chap are supposed to be the clueless ones. But it is Fraser who is the innocent: in fact, he looks almost unbearably innocent, his broad, open, handsome and lovable face is boyish, even babyish. The Mummy wouldn’t have been a hit without him.
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