Dumb things in 'The Mummy'

Alright, I actually like watching The Mummy - it’s on Starz practically on a 24-hour loop, and it is a good background to making dinner and other household chores. Mostly what I like are Rachel Weisz, Brendan Fraser, and John Hannah - they are all very charming actors, and work well together.

But come on, there are some really dumb and/or tired plot devices in this movie. My favorite is the guy with the glasses. First of all, if he were so blind he couldn’t make his way down a straight, narrow passage, his glasses whould have been incredibly thick, which they weren’t. I have 20/500 vision, and you can bet your ass I would have been sprinting down that tunnel with everyone else, glasses or no. Second, what does the mummy take from him? His eyes! So, shouldn’t the mummy be stumbling around ineffectually trying to find the exit?

Just had to share. Thank you.

Er, no one told me if I put “The Mummy” in quotes it would vanish from my thread title! Sorry.

Come on, a little suspension of disbelief, here? The mummy took the skin from every other stupid American, but he doesn’t actually look like them. So he takes the eyes and improves on them a bit.

But what really gets my goat is the ludicrous inclusion of the “10 Plagues of Egypt.” Like they have any business in a horrible Egyptian curse, or in the entire movie for that matter.

MR

Heh, I fixed it before you even made your second post. For some bizarre reason, the double quotation marks cause the software to ignore anything enclosed in them. You have to use the apostrophe, or single quote marks, instead.

And then they didn’t even use ten plagues . . .

It’s still a great movie, though.

Well, some of the other plagues would seem irrelevant and/or incomprehensible to the average audience. What did they leave out? Let’s see, there’s “death of the firstborn” which would have confused people badly, and the plague on cattle which would have made people say “WTF has that got to do with anything?” Then there were the toads; yah, those are horrifying. :rolleyes:

It was a fun movie, though. My friends and I nearly fell out of our seats laughing at it.

Yes, I could see how the logical inconsistencies in a movie about a thousand-year-old mummy coming back to life would be troubling. What bothered me the most was this: why did they call him a mummy instead of a daddy?

I think this may be the dopeyest movie ever made. Here are a few of my favorite dumbnesses:

  • There’s a centuries old organization dedicated to keeping mummy entombed. The mummy ends up being released by its leaders assistant. With information she learned at his library. Nice work.

  • These same protectors ride into camp and have an extended gun fight with the explorers who are raiding the tomb. After numerous deaths they stop unexpectedly and leave, warning that they’ll be back tomorrow if the raiders don’t abandon the site. Thus allowing the alleged Egyptologists to do precisely what they’ve dedicated their lives to preventing.

  • The mummy’s weakness is cats. In one scene, Brendan Fraser saves the day by hurling a tabby at him.

At least the remake took care of one inconsistancy with the original: Just how would it be to outrun a shambling mummy?

I totally agree. They made this HUGE deal out of how bad the guy’s eyesight was, as if to tell us “Don’t worry–when the mummy steals his eyes, this will be a way for the good guys to have an advantage for a short time!” And then they completely ignored it. I don’t think the mummy would LOOK like the people whose skin he took, but I would expect that skin to have the same limitiations or whatever. If he took the skin off a guy with no legs, then the mummy’s legs would still be skinless and he’d need some leg skin from another guy.

Not to say I didn’t like the movie, because it is one of my all-time favorites. I found it very enjoyable, but the eye thing really bugged me. I mean, couldn’t they at least have acknowledged the fact that he stole bad eyes? Have him squint a lot or something. If they weren’t going to acknowledge it, why did they make a big deal out of the fact that the guy had bad eyesight? AAARRGGH!

I’ll shut up now. Good movie, though.

Courtesy of Movie-Mistakes.com:

My additions to the above:

Sure, there might be quicksand in Egypt, but in the middle of a dry desert? My understanding of quicksand was that the sand is suspended in water.

The bandage thing is odd; a black wrapping appears on Fraser’s left hand just after the mummy-guards leave him, just before he starts fighting Imhotep. No sign of where it came from.

Do some counting of the shots fired from each gun during the fight scenes. On the boat, one American’s revolver fires at least 11 shots (and he’s plainly using only one gun, because he’s using his free hand to fan the hammer). From his two revolvers, Fraser gets around 18 shots from a single reload, and does it again when shooting at Imhotep just before the first “cat scare”.

Why do they need that dumb ‘key’? It doesn’t appear to displace any tumblers or anything…they should be able to open all the locks that require that ‘key’ with a screwdriver.

End of movie: Beni is trapped in the treasure room. It’s plain that he will soon expire from either suffocation or starvation, surrounded by the gold he so coveted. Wouldn’t it have been BETTER, O Filmmakers, to leave it there, rather than bringing out the beetles one last time? They did Beni a favor by making his death quick. I mean, what’s the point of offering TWO horrible-death situations when either one would suffice on its own?

The “bad eyes” problem has never bothered me as much, simply because I figure that, if ol’ Mummers can alter flesh to make it his own, he would be able to do the same with organs like eyes. But, then, if a viewer has to explain a flaw in a film, the filmmakers didn’t do their jobs.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but out of the many frustrating inconsistencies, the one that gets me the most is this: If the mummy has the magical wherewhithal to come up with a great whonking dust storm to destroy the airplane, why on earth does he get into a physical fight with Brendan? Seems if you could call up a storm, you could just snap your fingers and produce enough energy to pulverize a mortal–the mummy equivalent of Indiana pulling out his pistol and shooting the swordsman.

I intend to show “The Mummy” at my Bad Film Festival this year. I cannot believe how wonderfully, cheesily bad it is.

I’d like to show the 1972 version of “Lost Horizon”, too, if I can find it. It can be “Bad Remake Night”.