WARNING: Spoilers for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy ahead!
When a horror re-imagining of a widely-beloved film is announced, it can be assumed that it was probably good enough to somewhat hold up to the original. At the very least, it can be assumed that it will share a lot of similarities with the original.
Right?
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy does neither of those things, but still manages to be a decently enjoyable, fairly average horror movie.
The Mummy has almost an entirely different plot than the original, one which is somehow much weirder. It focuses on a family who briefly live in Egypt for the father’s job. When their daughter gets kidnapped, they move back to Albuquerque for years before they’re alerted that their daughter is alive, and was found in a sarcophagus after the airplane that was transporting it was involved in a train accident. A few days in the hospital and their daughter, who looks extremely grey and is basically nonverbal, is encouraged to go home.
If you thought that sounded like a great idea, you’re thinking the exact same thing as everyone else in this movie. In The Mummy, every single character seems to not have any critical thinking skills whatsoever. In fact, it would be surprising to learn that most of them were capable of thought in general. For pretty much the entire runtime, most characters just sit there and learn exposition while they wait for their daughter, who obviously has something supernatural going on with her, to attack them. When she does attack them, all they do is tranquilize her and wait around until it wears off to repeat the cycle.
Even though part of the fun of horror movies is being able to complain about what idiots characters are for making decisions that lead to their deaths, the characters in The Mummy make so many awful decisions that it gets boring. The part that’s meant to be the scariest, the climax, only served its purpose for about 30 seconds before watching the characters refuse to make any decisions just got frustrating.
The Mummy kept some things from the original, though— none more noticeable than the racism!
The Mummy (1999) is pretty undeniably racist. Arabs are treated like exotic background characters who have mystical knowledge that the main character lacks. None of them are given the luxury of actually being major characters, and only a few are given lines that remind the audience that they’re people. The movie falls victim to the classic trope, à la Indiana Jones, of a brave explorer recovering lost artifacts for the benefit of foreign interests. In The Mummy (1999), local Egyptians are treated like stepping stones who have useful advice for the main character, but would never do anything on their own.
The Mummy does exactly this, but in a new, fun, and more covert (to the modern audience) way!
Everything about the movie implies that Arabs are predatory and dangerous to nice, white families. When the daughter is initially kidnapped, it’s by an Egyptian woman. This probably seems obvious— they live in Egypt. Who else is going to kidnap her?
The way they frame it is what makes it so awful. This woman, in the plot, manipulates and kidnaps a little girl to transfer an evil spirit into her body. This ritual, which supposedly prevents the evil spirit from being released into the world, is one that has been passed down through her family for over eighty generations. This perpetuates racist stereotypes about Arabs that have been around for centuries.
This movie has, once again, portrayed Arabs as a primitive, superstitious, and magical group who are hostile towards white people for no good reason. At best, this portrayal is ignorant and unthoughtful: at worst, it’s malicious and harmful. People of color are consistently shown as the aggressors against poor, defenseless white people in pop culture, and The Mummy is an amazing example of how racist stereotypes can easily fly under the radar.
However, in many ways, The Mummy improves on The Mummy (1999) by actually treating Arabs like people. The woman who is, arguably, the hero of the story is an Arab woman. She’s the only person who gets anything done at all.
Her character is one of the strongest in the whole movie: she has motivation, interests, and an actual personality. In this way, The Mummy somewhat fails at being racist, because the only likeable character is an Arab woman, not any of the random, victimized white people that the movie is about.
Despite these obvious flaws, a lot of the movie is genuinely interesting. It’s easy to think that the daughter is obviously a mummy, but the movie invites you to wonder what you would actually do in that situation. How many random attacks would it take for you to believe that your daughter, who is somewhat reasonably just displaying signs of PTSD, is possessed by an Ancient Egyptian spirit?
The answer, of course, is that you probably wouldn’t think that until the third time she started levitating. After that, all bets are kind of off.
As far as horror movies go, it’s got a pretty standard plot and format. The idea of a loved one “coming back wrong” is nothing new to the genre, and The Mummy certainly doesn’t expand on it in any meaningful way. Oddly, that fact makes the movie much better. It’s already bizarre in so many ways that it having a very standard “horror movie” plot lets the audience have something familiar they can latch on to while they watch.
Additionally, it has a somewhat happy ending. This isn’t always a positive, but when there are already so many negatives and the movie isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, it’s more fun to have an ending you can feel good about. If the ending had been anything but happy, this movie would have been borderline unwatchable.
Generally, The Mummy is a misleading, genuinely bizarre movie that’s frequently very racist. Considering the state of horror movies, though, all of those traits put it solidly in the middle of the pack. It’s a perfect movie for people who don’t expect it to be anything like The Mummy (1999) and who don’t mind that it follows a very similar plot to most other movies. While it’s worth giving a shot, don’t be surprised if it bores or frustrates you to the grave.
