Director: Stephen Sommers
Cast: Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz, John Hannah, Arnold Vosloo
Have I Seen it Before: 1999 was a strange time. All we wanted was a fourth Indiana Jones movie. Until that film finally came around to fulfill its inevitable level of disappointment, we’d take practically anything with archaeologists and deserts and long scenes where square-jawed heroes wield torches.
That’s where this movie comes in.
Did I Like It: Where Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) took the trappings of the B-movie and made them with the best possible tools—from special effects, to cinematography, to actors, stunt work, all the way to music—and redefined what a-list entertainment, this very-thin remake of the Boris Karloff classic is content to eschew those ambitions and do something most films couldn’t and wouldn’t dare:
It’s just a B movie. There are a few run-of-the-mill desert sequences that reach for epic, but much of this feels like it was shot in a studio, and not a terribly impressive one, at that. The CGI creatures only kind of worked over twenty years ago. And while Brendan Fraser is an amiable screen presence (who should have been afforded the opportunity to work more then and now), I think even he would agree with you that he doesn’t have the charisma of a Harrison Ford.
But, is there not some degree of delight in the fluff that comes with being a B-movie? What’s wrong with being a B-movie? Plenty of prestige entertainments are positively turgid, and I would certainly rather re-watch this movie than the vast majority of supposedly more considered festival screeners I have to watch.
At least it avoided that unbelievable awful b-team Nintendo-64 cartridge CGI that they broke out for The Rock in The Mummy Returns (2001).
Now that I’ve thought about it, that first thought I had about Raiders being the b-movie perfected, and this movie just being a modern B-movie may be a little unfair. The Mummy features a score by Jerry Goldsmith, and if it’s controversial to think that Goldsmith is just as good as John Williams, then I will happily be a lightning rod for that controversy.