The Mummy Trilogy (1999-2008) Review

The Mummy trilogy is one of those odd, almost unique trilogies where all three films are pretty damn good. I enjoyed every one of them from beginning to end, and I’ve seen them all multiple times. Most franchises run out of gas by the second film.

This one didn’t. It kept its sense of fun all the way to China, and that’s why I keep going back to it.

Stephen Sommers wrote and directed the first two, and Rob Cohen directed the third. Brendan Fraser plays Rick O’Connell in all three, a cheerful mercenary who fights ancient evil with a shotgun and a wisecrack. Between 1999 and 2008 the three films made well over a billion dollars worldwide.

They borrowed the name from the 1932 Boris Karloff horror film, and that’s about all they borrowed. Sommers made an adventure serial, closer to Indiana Jones than to Universal horror, and he filled it with people you’re happy to spend two hours with.

The Mummy (1999): 9/10

It’s the 1920s. Rick O’Connell, a former French Foreign Legion soldier, leads librarian Evelyn Carnahan and her useless brother Jonathan to Hamunaptra, the lost city of the dead. A rival American expedition gets there too, and between them they wake up Imhotep, a priest buried alive three thousand years earlier for murdering a pharaoh and loving the pharaoh’s mistress.

Imhotep wants his lover back, and he’s willing to eat his way through the expedition to get her. He brings plagues, flesh-eating scarabs, a sandstorm with his face in it and an army of mummies. Rick answers with guns, bravado and a surprising amount of running away.

The film cost about $80 million and made roughly $415 million. It deserved every dollar. It’s funny, it’s fast, it’s a little scary, and it never forgets you came to have a good time. It gets a 9 because it does exactly what an adventure movie should, and it does it with style.

Rick, Evy and the Best Cast in the Series

Brendan Fraser is the reason this works. Rick is brave and competent, but he also yelps, panics and gets knocked flat, and Fraser plays him like a man enjoying the chaos even while it’s trying to kill him. You never doubt he’ll win, and you never stop worrying he’ll trip on the way.

Rachel Weisz makes Evelyn the brains of the expedition. She reads the ancient texts, figures out the curse and makes most of the mistakes that drive the plot, starting with reading from the Book of the Dead out loud. She and Fraser have real chemistry, and their bickering romance gives the film its heart.

John Hannah steals scenes as Jonathan, a coward and a thief who is somehow lovable. Arnold Vosloo makes Imhotep menacing with very little dialogue, Kevin J. O’Connor is gloriously slimy as Beni, and Oded Fehr gives Ardeth Bay, the desert warrior sworn to keep Imhotep buried, real dignity.

Hannah’s Jonathan is the character I’d follow into a fourth film on his own. Whenever a scene needs the air let out of it, he’s there with a grab for somebody’s gold or a whimper at the wrong moment, and I’d have happily taken more of him.

The Mummy Returns (2001): 8/10

Sommers brought the whole cast back and made everything bigger. It’s 1933, Rick and Evy are married with a smart-mouthed son, Alex, and Imhotep is resurrected in London by a cult that wants him to beat the Scorpion King and take command of the Army of Anubis. Alex ends up wearing a bracelet that will kill him in seven days, and the chase is on.

It’s louder and more crowded than the first film, with a double-decker bus chase through London, pygmy mummies in the jungle, a dirigible and a battle between two armies of the dead. Some of the computer effects have aged badly, most famously the Scorpion King himself. None of that stopped me enjoying it.

What keeps it an 8 is the people. The family banter works, Freddie Boath is fun as Alex, and the film adds a reincarnation story for Evy that gives Weisz more to play. It made about $444 million and set up Dwayne Johnson’s first starring role in The Scorpion King spinoff.

The Scorpion King effect is the one thing I’d go back and fix if I could. He’s the payoff the whole film has been building toward, and he looks like a video game cutscene dropped into a real movie. The rest of the sequel is good enough that I forgive it, and it keeps its 8.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008): 8/10

The third film moved the series to China in 1946 and swapped Egypt for an emperor cursed into terracotta. Jet Li plays the Emperor, Michelle Yeoh plays the sorceress who cursed him, and a grown-up Alex, now played by Luke Ford, accidentally wakes him up.

Critics were harder on this one than on the first two, and plenty of fans didn’t like Maria Bello replacing Rachel Weisz as Evy. I think it’s better than its reputation. Rick and Evy are older, bored with retirement and itching for one more adventure, and that gives the film a warm, slightly rueful edge.

It has a runaway carriage chase through Shanghai, yetis in the Himalayas and a terracotta army marching across the plains. Jet Li brings real menace, and Fraser is as game as ever. It’s an 8 because it’s a good time with characters I’d already spent two films liking.

Goldsmith, Biddle and the Look of Adventure

Jerry Goldsmith scored the first film, and his music does half the work. It’s big, brassy and old-fashioned, full of Middle Eastern color and swashbuckling fanfares, and it tells you from the opening minutes that you’re in for a proper adventure. Alan Silvestri took over for The Mummy Returns and kept the same spirit.

Adrian Biddle’s cinematography on the first film makes the desert look enormous and golden, and the tombs look cramped and dark. The effects work, from the sandstorm face to Imhotep regenerating one layer of flesh at a time, was cutting-edge in 1999, and most of it still looks good today. The films also look expensive in the right places. Sommers spent money on crowds, locations and sets you can believe in, so when the computer effects arrive they sit inside a real, tactile world. That’s a big part of why the series ages well.

Brendan Fraser Across Three Films

Fraser gives a very consistent performance across nearly a decade. Rick gets older, becomes a husband and a father, and never loses the goofy courage that made him fun in the first place. That consistency is a big reason the trilogy feels like one story.

He also did much of his own stunt work and took a real beating for it. You can see it on screen: the falls look like they hurt, because they did. That physical truth gives the silliness weight.

After the trilogy his career went quiet for years before his Oscar-winning comeback in The Whale. Watching these films now, it’s easy to see why audiences never forgot him.

The Spinoff and the Reboot

The Scorpion King in 2002 took the villain from The Mummy Returns and built a sword-and-sandals film around Dwayne Johnson. It launched his movie career and a string of direct-to-video sequels, and it has little to do with Rick O’Connell’s world. In 2017 Universal rebooted the series with Tom Cruise as the start of a planned Dark Universe of monster films. It was grim where Sommers’s films were playful, audiences stayed away, and the whole shared-universe plan collapsed after one movie. That failure is the best argument for the original trilogy. Sommers understood that people wanted to have fun with a mummy. The reboot treated its monster like homework, and a mummy movie embarrassed to be a mummy movie has no point.

Craft Note

Is The Mummy Trilogy as good as people say?

Yes, and it’s rarer than people realize. Most trilogies have a weak link. This one has a great first film and two very good sequels, and all three are fun to watch again.

Start with the 1999 film, a 9, then carry on through The Mummy Returns and Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, both 8s. The first film gets the higher number because Weisz, Goldsmith and Sommers are all at full strength, and the sequels lose a little of each. What they never lose is Fraser, and he’s the reason I rate the whole run this high.

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