The Mummy (Collector's Edition-Widescreen) (1999)

USA Today
"...[The] sights do astonish..." 05/07/1999 p.8E

Chicago Sun-Times
"...There's a lot of funny dialogue in the movie..." 05/07/1999 p.31

Total Film
"...You get: fun, some flashy effects and a bit of a laugh..." 06/01/2000 p.88

Boxoffice Magazine 0 of 10
This isn't your mummy's Mummy. This isn't the meandering, bandaged, only somewhat undead corpse who you could run behind, kick the ass of and run away before it could even turn around. This is a supernatural, plague-wreaking, organ-removing, fly-spewing Creature of Eternal Night who, after 3,000 years entombed under the sands of Egypt, is inadvertently awakened by a prim but nubile 1920s-era librarian (Rachel Weisz). Now she must stop him, with the help of a brashly charismatic adventurer (Brendan Fraser) and her comically alcoholic gadabout brother (John Hannah), before he destroys the world. Aspiring to combine the mystical epic adventure of Raiders of the Lost Ark with the larger-than-life Love Never Dies impetus of Dracula, this Mummy comes off more like the monster of Frankenstein--a rudimentarily-stitched aggregation of elements that comes alive in spite of itself. The romance never quite sparks, the dangers are standard genre-issue and the plot has holes more conspicuous than the desiccated mummy's beetle-ridden body, but the effects-driven film should still be able to perform a feat even more formidable than resurrecting the dead: holding a teenager's attention for a two-hour span. - Christine James
 
New York Times 0 of 10
The Mummy, directed by Stephen Sommers, bills itself as "a full-scale reimagining" of the 1932 horror classic in which Boris Karloff plays a resuscitated mummy stalking a pretty English girl he believes to be the reincarnation of his long-lost sweetheart. In the remake, still set in the mid-1920s, he sets his sights on Evelyn (Rachel Weisz), a plucky English librarian who plumbs the mysteries of Hamunaptra with her twitty elder brother, Jonathan (John Hannah), and Rick (Brendan Fraser), an American adventurer who stumbled upon the burial site while rattling around Egypt (really Morocco) with the foreign legion. Fraser's Rick is a flaky chip off Harrison Ford's block. Easygoing and indestructible, he tosses off bluff, cartoon-balloon quips while blithely hacking at the limbs of the zombies hurling themselves at him with kamikaze-like fury. His exclamations make Ford's throwaway remarks in the Indiana Jones films seem positively Shakespearean in their depth and rationality. This version of The Mummy has no pretenses to be anything other than a gaudy comic video game splashed onto the screen. Think Raiders of the Lost Ark with cartoon characters, no coherent story line and lavish but cheesy special effects. Think Night of the Living Dead stripped of genuine horror and restaged as an Egyptian-theme Halloween pageant... Being a parody gives The Mummy license to indulge whatever farcical whims come into its empty head, but the shocks tend to be stock jack-in-the-box surprises and trap-door pratfalls. As for creepiness, the one special effect that gets under your skin, as it were, involves swarms of lustrous scarabs. The creatures that have been nibbling at Imhotep's entrails for 3,000 years hide in luminescent gemlike casings. If you are foolish enough to pry one open, out pops a shiny black beetle that immediately burrows under your skin and begins hungrily zipping around your body (think Alien). These demonic creatures are the most entertaining element of The Mummy. - Stephen Holden
 
ReelViews 7 of 10
The Mummy is pretty silly stuff. But that's okay when you consider that, beneath all the action/adventure and horror trappings, it's actually a comedy. Think of a big-budget, high profile effort in the vein of Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness with less camp and better special effects. The Mummy never takes itself seriously, and neither should we. It's a good thing it is funny because, as a thriller, it's an underwhelming effort. I suppose there are times when The Mummy makes an attempt to get the adrenaline pumping, but it never tries too hard. In the end, it's the self-mocking aura that save this film from being a waste of two hours...Expectations will likely color most movie-goers' opinions of The Mummy. Those who buy a ticket anticipating a high-octane appetizer to The Phantom Menace will be disappointed. On the other hand, those who are primed for a ludicrous adventure/horror parody will discover that The Mummy has the potential to satisfy. Considering how many would-be blockbusters fail at that simple task, it's possible to forgive this movie many of its numerous faults and enjoy it for what it is trying to achieve, not what the marketing campaign claims it to be. - James Berardinelli
 
Chicago Sun-Times 8 of 10
There is within me an unslaked hunger for preposterous adventure movies. I resist the bad ones, but when a "Congo" or an "Anaconda" comes along, my heart leaps up and I cave in. "The Mummy" is a movie like that. There is hardly a thing I can say in its favor, except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script, the direction, the acting or even the mummy, but I can say that I was not bored and sometimes I was unreasonably pleased. There is a little immaturity stuck away in the crannies of even the most judicious of us, and we should treasure it...None of this has anything to do with the great horror classic "The Mummy" (1932), which starred Boris Karloff in a strangely poignant performance as a long-dead priest who returns to life and falls in love with the modern reincarnation of the woman he died for. The 1932 movie contains no violence to speak of; there's hardly any action, indeed, and the chills come through slow realizations (hey, did that mummy move?)...Look, art this isn't. Great trash, it isn't. Good trash, it is. It's not quite up there with "Anaconda," but it's as much fun as "Congo" and "The Relic," and it's better than "Species." If those four titles are not intimately familiar to you, "The Mummy" might not be the place to start. - Roger Ebert