In the Flesh: The Mummy (Patreon)

The Mummy is such a good action flick, big and shaggy and brilliantly scored by composer Jerry Goldsmith. Some of its CGI hasn’t aged well, it trades freely in embarrassing racist stereotypes, and its mythology is a little convenient and convoluted, but as a coda to both the romantic historical epics and wise-cracking action movies of the 90s it fires on all cylinders right from the jump. The opening battle sequence, the glib little auction-cum-hanging, the delightful horse versus camel race in the deep desert — there’s so much to chew on, and even though the movie never lets up there’s enough downtime that the characters feel, if not precisely unique, lived-in and energetic. Brendan Frasier, Arnold Vosloo, and Kevin J. O’Connor in particular give great, charismatic little performances. Oded Fehr is almost unbelievably hot.

Director Stephen Sommers’s movie is a kind of stripped down and repurposed Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a lush, maximalist love story about a gooey immortal being who can’t get over his first girlfriend. Its crypt sets are dripping with detail, and if there’s not much going on with Sommers’s shot compositions, he does know how to shoot intriguing depth of field, and how to make a spectacle feel grand or terrible even as the characters are mouthing off about it. Rachel Weisz and Frasier have great chemistry, and their mugging for the camera and little gags like Weisz rushing back into frame after her bumbling brother Jonathan drops a priceless relic into a pit of ooze feel sincere rather than arch. It’s a movie without pretension, straightforward for both good and ill. On the one hand you get fun action, some genuinely nasty death sequences — on the other you get repeated jokes about the fat, smelly Iranian merchant whose greed seals his ignominious fate.

The colors in The Mummy are often overlooked in favor of its merits as a swashbuckling Indiana Jones-esque romp, but watching it again for the first time in over a decade I was struck by how gorgeously Sommers handles shooting in the deep Sahara, painting pictures of limestone white, craggy brown, and shades of beige and dun which seem lively rather than desolate. Even the blacks and grays of Imhotep’s funerary shrouds are shaded with deep greens, metallic blues, and pale, gauzy creams. The sets, as a rule, are well-dressed and nicely dusty and grimy, and the CGI on the newly reanimated mummy holds up surprisingly well, built as it is on a scaffold of practical effects. He looks like a sort of stop-motion Frank Cotton from Hellraiser, all slimy exposed muscle and filthy rags. For better and for worse, The Mummy is exactly the same movie it was when it blew 1999’s spring box office wide open.