|
|
|
| MUMMY, THE (1999) - PG-13
|
|  |
|
ReviewScore: 49 out of 100
SBD Star Rating:
by Lew Irwin
View Credits | See Other Reviews
| |
Syndicated columnist Liz Smith took the wraps off The Mummy on Thursday by praising it as "the hands-down-all-out-fun techno-miracle of 1999." She added: "I suppose Star Wars will top it, but for the next couple of weeks, I can't see how The Mummy won't rule the box office." While the folks at Universal, whose parent, Seagram, released another horror story in a quarterly earnings report Thursday (see separate item), must be praying that she is right, many movie critics are not equally enthusiastic. Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post notes that the film's principal villain is "a bald guy." He adds that in movies, "I don't know why, your bald guy is usually a strangler. That's what you find in the all-but-mummyless Mummy. Almost no mummies, one very large bald guy. Still, it's difficult to hold this against Universal Studios. How well would you expect a movie called Bald Guy to do? These people are not in business to lose money." He describes the film as "fast and furious, shallow, empty, casually racist, merry, jaunty, silly and utterly weightless." MSNBC's Joe Leydon comments: "The movie is extremely loud and indefatigably busy, but that's not quite the same thing as being exciting and entertaining. It's worth seeing only if you absolutely must have a quick fantasy-action fix to tide you over during the wait for The Phantom Menace." Stephen Holden in the New York Times calls it "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." Peter Howell in the Toronto Star figures the filmmakers "don't know horror from hokey." Steve Murray in the Atlanta Journal dismisses the film as "a petrified mixture of retro adventure, clumsy slapstick and minimal chills." But The Mummy does have several critics rooting for it. Jonathan Foreman in the New York Post describes it as "cheerful, slightly cheesy entertainment that uses the latest special-effects techniques to breathe life into a venerable film tradition." Jack Mathews in the New York Daily News adds: "Even if The Mummy is imitation Spielberg, it offers more bang for the buck than we're used to getting. And the film maker went out of his way to shape a horror film for the whole family." Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times pays the movie this most left-handed of compliments: "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." |
|
|
|
