`Mummy’ dialogue falls short of original> Brendan Fraser solid in loud, showy remake

THE MUMMY, written and directed by Stephen Sommers. Running time: 124 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for violence, mild language and partial nudity).

Well, apparently the rumors are true: In spite of its title and the misleading fact that it was released just before Mother’s Day, “The Mummy” isn’t at all a British film about tepid English mothers, and that, without question, must have turned Mother’s Day on its side.

The film is actually a high-tech remake of Karl Freund’s 1932 film “The Mummy,” which starred Boris Karlof as the king of rotting corpses, a mummified Egyptian who yearned to get it on with actress Zita Johann in his dusty sarcophagus.

That film’s strength was its subtlety, the spooky atmosphere Freund created through claustrophobic camera work, and its surprisingly moving performance by Karlof, who made audiences believe that a 3,000-year romance really could exist between mortal and mummy — even without Viagra.

Stephen Sommers’ remake has an entirely different vision; his film is loud and showy like a beauty pageant contest, only not quite as bright. It’s an Indiana Jones wannabe that may have captured the look of Spielberg’s popular series, but has none of the magic and euphoria that made the series such an enjoyable hit.

The film stars Brendan Fraser as Rick O’Connell, a dashing, foreign Legionnaire of the 1920s who accidentally discovers a necropolis: the Egyptian city of Hamunaptra.

Knowing that buried beneath the city is a fortune in Egyptian loot, O’Connell eventually teams with a beautiful librarian named Evelyn (Rachel Wiesz) and her boozy brother, Jonathan (John Hannah), to retrieve the fortune.

The catch? The fortune is also being sought by a band of other treasure hunters — and, oh yes, it’s fiercely protected by scores of zombies, flesh-eating scarab beetles and a mummy called Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) who’s capable of all sorts of dirty deeds, even turning into a sandstorm that bears his face.

Watching “The Mummy” certainly can be fun — director Sommers gets miles out of his special effects, and Fraser, fresh from “Gods and Monsters,” is once again solid in a role that demands, above all, that he be solid among gods and monsters. But the film is an unoriginal pastiche of other films, including “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad,” “Hellraiser,” “Night of the Living Dead,” the swashbuckling films of the 1930s and, incredibly enough, even “The English Patient.”

There are other problems, most of which stem from Sommers’ illiterate script, which is not scary and features dialogue so lame the characters should have kept mum. But the main problem is the mummy itself, which is less a character than it is a walking bucket of hissing gray spaghetti.

Unlike Karlof, who conveyed a complexity of emotions in spite of the bandages that bound him, Vosloo’s monster wears no bandages, and conveys only rage. For prepubescent boys, that’ll work just fine — they love hissing gray spaghetti. But for those seeking a bit more from their mummy, well, this mummy is a bit too dead and buried to suit. Grade: C+

Video of the week

CUBE, directed by Vincenzo Natali. Written by Andre Bijelic, Natali and Graeme Manson. Running time: 91 minutes. Rated R (for language and graphic violence).

Vincenzo Natali’s sci-fi thriller “Cube” proves that vision and style are no substitutes for weak acting.

The film, which somehow won the Best Canadian Feature Debut at the 1997 Toronto International Film Festival, certainly looks great. It traps several strangers in what essentially is a gigantic Rubik’s Cube, complete with scores of differently colored, booby-trapped rooms, each separated by six pneumatic doors.

Reminiscent of Darren Aronofsky’s “Pi” in that everything seems to hinge on a mathematical equation, the film does offer a terrific opening: One of the trapped is literally sliced into cubes while searching for a way out. It’s an effect that’s not only chilling, but works because the scene has no dialogue — which is where “Cube,” very much like “The Mummy,” consistently falls short.

Couple this low dialogue with six bad stage actors all hustling for screen time in a 14-foot-square space, and you can just imagine the histrionics that take place. But those hissy fits are as unconvincing as the film’s rare moments of introspection — there is always the sense that the actors are either reading their lines from cue cards or — worse — improvising.

This is perhaps the first film in history that would have been perfectly suited for mimes. Just imagine each trying to mime their way out of this cube. Grade: C-

Christopher Smith’s film reviews appear each Monday in the Bangor Daily News. Each week on WLBZ’s “News Center 5:30 Today” and “News Center Tonight,” he reviews current feature films (Tuesdays) and what’s new and worth renting at video stores (Thursdays).