The Mummy opens in ancient Egypt as a powerful Pharaoh learns that his mistress and high priest have been fooling around behind his back. He confronts the pair, who respond by stabbing him to death. Before the guards can apprehend her, the mistress takes her own life, confident that her sorcerer/lover will resurrect her. But before the dark priest known as Imhotep can complete the task, he is seized by authorities who cut out his tongue, mummify him alive and bury him in a sarcophagus full of voracious scarabs.
Flashforward 3000 years to the 1920s. Despite the best efforts of warriors committed to keeping the hidden ruins of Hamunaptra a secret (and the mummy in his tomb), treasure seekers find the lost city of the dead, read from a book of the dead and, well, wake the dead. Needless to say, Imhotep—without his morning coffee—rises in a really bad mood and goes on a vengeful rampage against the people who interrupted his multi-millennial snooze. Led by Indiana Jones-wannabe Rick O’Connell, the group must defeat the slowly regenerating corpse before Imhotep kills them all and resurrects his forbidden love. It’s a slam-bang special effects-fest that relies less on plot than on action that piles up a considerable body count.
Positive Elements: Moments of heroism and self-sacrifice. One character’s chronic disloyalty is held in low esteem. Modest flirtation between Rick and Evelyn avoids sexual overtones or innuendoes.
Spiritual Content: When cornered by the mummy, a conniving, weaselly man rattles through a necklace full of religious icons (including a cross and the star of David), reciting a prayer to each in hopes of escaping violent death. Imhotep is able to recreate plagues that God used to punish Egypt (locusts, flies, water to blood, darkness). In a climactic ceremony, Imhotep uses incantations and other occult means—including a human sacrifice—in an attempt to restore life to his mummified lover. He summons the undead to do battle with Rick (a scene reminiscent of the sword-wielding skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts) and is only thwarted when someone chants from another magical book.
Sexual Content: No sex, but the Pharaoh’s mistress appears in a see-through mesh top and thong bottom (basically, naked). Someone uses a crude expression for genitalia.
Violent Content: Pretty much non-stop. At times The Mummy plays like a blast-anything-that-moves video game. Numerous men die in gunfights or at the points of swords during flurries of mass brutality and war. Some are stabbed with knives. Others catch fire. Rick survives being hung from gallows, though his fall through the platform is disturbingly explicit. Hungry beetles burrow underneath people’s skin and eat them from the inside out, or swarm over bodies like a school of piranha, leaving a mess of bone and sinew. Slaves are melted by acid. Once Imhotep shakes the dust off and reenters the world, he starts sucking the life out of people in order to consume their organs and regenerate himself (one poor soul survives having his eyes gouged out and his tongue removed before Imhotep finishes him off). After a man dies in a plane crash, his body and the aircraft both sink into quicksand. Rick severs Imhotep’s arm, but the monster reaches down and reattaches the limb. The movie’s sizable body count—and high gross-out quotient—almost make it easy to overlook “unspectacular” violence including several fistfights and a scene in which the film’s heroes drive recklessly through a crowded marketplace and mow down slow-moving locals.
Crude or Profane Language: Evelyn asks Rick for a vow of honesty by prompting, “Do you swear?” He replies, “Every d— day.” Still, the language is surprisingly restrained for a PG-13 release. There’s quite a bit of mild profanity, but no s- or f-words. Christian viewers will take exception to several exclamatory uses of the Lord’s name.
Drug and Alcohol Content: Occasional alcohol use is aggravated by three scenes that play drunkenness for laughs.
Other Negative Elements: Accused of being deceptive, Jonathan tells his sister, Evelyn, “I lie to everybody. What makes you so special?” Lots of emaciated corpses litter the screen. Some moments exist solely to disgust squeamish viewers, such as the scene in which a partially decayed Imhotep kisses Evelyn on the mouth, or when he eliminates the annoying scarab traveling through his neck and toward his brain by crunching down on it with his rotting teeth. Yuck.
Summary: The Mummy staggers for a number of reasons. First, it dares audiences to think of the various time-honored serials and matinee favorites it’s ripping off. For example, a scene on a burning boat seemed to be an imitation of the engulfed tavern sequence in Raiders of the Lost Ark (right down to the last-minute rescue of a vital map-producing artifact from the flames). Second, The Mummy is an uneven attempt at being an action-adventure/horror/comedy/romance all wrapped up in one. It loses its bearings about halfway through when its sense of humor takes over like a class clown who just doesn’t know when to quit. It descends into silliness. Sure, there are a few funny moments and some really wild special effects (fully exploited in Universal’s thrilling theatrical trailer), but that’s about it. Once Christian families factor in lots of violence and dark, occult overtones, it becomes obvious that this film is pointless entertainment that’s especially inappropriate for the 8- to 14-year-old boys most likely to be attracted to such incoherent eye-candy.
Nick Morton is Ahmanet’s official rope-looser. The mummy appreciates the gesture so much that she selects Nick as her next “beloved”—that is, the guy she’s going to kill to introduce Set to the world. And because of Ahmanet’s ability to weasel into his mind, Nick sometimes seems just fine with that. He’s described as a perfect vessel for Set, given his lack of morals and his dearth of consideration for anyone but himself.
But Jenny, the archaeologist, believes that underneath his rough exterior, Nick’s an OK guy. “I knew there was more to you than money,” she says.
No, no, sorry. That’s Princess Leia in Star Wars. (Wrong notes.) No, Jenny says, “Somewhere, fighting to get out, is a good man.” And turns out, she’s right: Nick turns from a selfish treasure-hunter into a self-sacrificing do-gooder. And he eventually shows a willingness to sacrifice pretty much everything—body, soul and spirit—for Jenny when the Egyptian chips are down.
There are a few others who’d like to prevent the end of the world, too, if possible. Dr. Henry Jekyll is especially keen to do so, even though he knows it means making some uncomfortable sacrifices himself.
Take a load off and set a spell, while I talk about Set and spells.
Set, as mentioned, is the Egyptian god of death. (Or god of the desert, war, storms, chaos, wind, war, darkness, disorder, violence, etc., etc., depending on which source you look at.) Jekyll calls him out as evil and says that Christians call the very same guy Satan and Lucifer. But rather than follow the Christian idea that Satan and evil are already actively influencing our world, Jekyll characterizes evil as lurking just outside it, looking for a way to come in.
Set has found a way into this realm through Ahmanet, who prays to the god and performs rites in his honor, and is thus rewarded with supernatural power. Her body is magically riddled with black, unreadable glyphs, and she’s apparently granted immortality as well (though the years do take a toll on her eventually). Some animals (birds, rats, spiders) seem to do her bidding, and she has the ability to control certain minds (sometimes through spider bites). She’s also able to call on the sand itself—including, apparently, sand grains of it that have been melted into glass. But perhaps her most fearsome ability is her knack for raising folks from the dead, who subsequently serve her as her shambling, zombie-like minions.
We also learn that hundreds of years earlier, some Christian Crusaders found Ahmanet’s crypt and spirited away her magic dagger (given to her by Set), hiding the blade in the statue of an angel (called a reliquary by Jenny) and a magic gem from its pommel in a Crusader grave. We assume that the Crusaders did this because they understood Ahmenet’s nature and wanted to keep a critical source of her power away from her.
Elsewhere, presumably Islamic fighters shoot up and deface ancient artifacts, mimicking the destruction we’ve seen from ISIS fighters. We hear that pharaohs were worshiped as “living gods.” Some scenes take place in old Christian churches and tombs. There’s talk about “angering the gods.”
[Spoiler Warning] Nick eventually gets stabbed by Ahmanet’s magical dagger, which infects him with the spirit of Set. His human side seems to keep the Set side of him at bay while still allowing Nick to use Set’s powers, including resurrecting a couple of people close to him.
Back in ancient Egypt, Ahmanet prays to Set naked: We see her nude form from the back and side in a handful of flashbacks. Even when she wears clothes back then, the robes are fairly gauzy and revealing. A lot of her skin (and sometimes bone and muscle) is visible after she’s mummified, too: When she looks like her younger self, the bandages are wrapped tightly around her in strategic areas, accentuating her figure rather than hiding it. She sometimes straddles her lovers/victims, running her hands down their chests suggestively. She both kisses and licks men.
Nick wakes up in a morgue, naked. (We see him from the side, but his genitals are obscured either by his hands or strategically placed tables.) Nick and Jenny also have a history. They banter suggestively about a the details of a one-night-stand they had in Bagdad. When Jenny accidentally reveals her midriff, Nick ogles her.
Ahmanet wasn’t a gentle woman even when she was just a mortal woman. We see her skirmish with others in the Egyptian desert, knocking men down painfully with poles. She holds a knife to the Pharaoh’s throat (though we don’t see her make the cut that comes next). A baby dies by her hand, too: Again, we don’t see the deed itself, but dark blood sprays tellingly across her contorted face. She’s just about to plunge a dagger into her lover when she’s caught; several darts puncture her neck, and hooks connected to cords pierce her body (though not in a particularly bloody fashion).
Once freed from her coffin, Ahmanet rejuvenates by pressing her lips to the mouths of innocents and literally sucking the life out of them. Her victims morph into mummy-like husks, which then rise and follow her. These creatures—as well as other dead bodies that Ahmanet raises—battle Nick and others. They fling themselves through car windows and swim after folks in water. They’re stubborn opponents, and even dismembering them doesn’t stop their attack. Nick sometimes thwacks off arms or heads or most of their bodies, and they still come. Nick sometimes kicks through their bodies or crushes their heads into billowing dust.
Ahmanet still rumbles, too. Blessed (cursed?) with superhuman strength, she can literally throw people around and smash massive tree limbs into splinters. At one point, she practically breaks Nick’s leg, too. (Nick, perhaps through supernatural means, seems physically fine afterwards.)
A plane crashes. Several people are either sucked out or die in the crash, and we see their bodies in a morgue later. Someone’s stabbed to death. Another man gets shot three times. Still another character, perhaps in an hallucigenic state, is attacked by writhing hordes of rats that cover his body. Someone drowns. Nick has an extended melee with another character.
Dr. Jekyll imprisons Ahmanet for a time: She’s again darted with hooks attached to cords and chained in a large room, where workers apparently inject her body with freezing mercury. “It hurts!” she complains loudly.
Soldiers shoot Ahmanet without effect. Nick and his friend Chris get pinned down during a gunfight. A sandstorm sends cars and busses flying and people scurrying for safety. Explosions go boom. Birds crash through plane windows; one leaves a bloody mark.
One s-word and a few other profanities, including “a–,” “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “d–n,” “h—,” “p-ss” and the British profanity “bloody.” God’s name is misused seven times.
Jenny and Nick spend time in a pub. Nick downs shots and chases them with beer. Other folks are shown drinking beer and other alcoholic beverages.
Nick and Chris are not archaeologists, but treasure hunters who raid ancient tombs and sell what they find there on the black market. Nick learns about Ahmanet’s tomb, actually, only after stealing a letter from Jenny.
Ahmanet vomits mercury.
On one level, you could say that The Mummy is about Nick—a wayward, moral-free treasure hunter who finds, in the end, a certain level of compassion, humanity, love and redemption. He’s asked to make sacrifices. And in time, he develops a willingness to answer that call.
And that’s all great … as far as it goes.
On another level, though—and this is really the level that counts—The Mummy is a mindless exercise in CGI wonder and PG-13 horror. It delivers action sequences strung together with just the barest thread of a plot or even reason. While it presents itself as a standard summer blockbuster (and, indeed, Universal has planned The Mummy as the first of a new franchise of classic monster reboots), it’s both surprisingly sexual and surprisingly frightening. The movie’s muddy spirituality should give many families pause, as well.
Mostly, though, this movie just felt confused. Its internal logic is inconsistent. Scenes show up for really no real reason at all—feeling about as stuffed in there as a walrus in spandex.
There’s no compelling reason why The Mummy should exist at all, really, other than to line Universal’s pockets. Sure, the same could be said for lots of would-be blockbusters, but most still want to tell a reasonably good, or at least sensible, story. You’ll find precious little sense in this flick. Perhaps it should’ve been kept under wraps.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
