The Mummy Unraveled: The Brendan Fraser Era

[Music] many people have made movies with the mummy in them but Universal was always the home for the most iconic mummy movies even after hammer made their Mark and countless other generic mummy movies were out universal was set to reinvent their archetypal movie monster in 1999 if you're interested in the hammer era and the classic black and white movies please go back and check those out or just stay here for the Brendan Frasier ERA this video is self-contained to just this era in the mummy's history a Trilogy five spin-off prequels and an animated series and since it's Universal's latest attempt to reboot the franchise we will end with the 2017 Tom Cruz mummy The Mummy 1999 I don't say this cynically but the mummy is the Indiana Jones movie we got in 1999 and yes it's a mummy movie and a comedy horror romance Adventure movie but the adventure part the swash buckling the two-fisted tomb raiding gunslinging reinvention of the Mummy was a big part of the success of this reimagination of what Universal's classic character could be the story is more complicated than the classic mummy stories and while still incorporating the tropes of grave robbing and the mummies revenge and the romance but it turns up the dial so that no part of the movie isn't Fun advances and special effects played a big role in the success of the film being able to portray the regenerating Mummy at each phase of his metamorphosis back into a man in a way that audiences hadn't seen before but I personally think it was the way writer director Steven Summers tapped into the archaeology angle to make his mummy movie an Indiana Jones style hybrid action adventure horror it's a comedy too it's a it's a romance and this movie is a beast that hits all the marks I know I said it before but making it a true family film that works for all audiences is no small accomplishment imotep is back from the 1932 classic and Summers expands The Mummy to his full power rather than just showcasing another bumbling corpse dragging his lame leg after him instead we get an imotep at the heights of his powers turning into sand causing sandstorms and walls of sand and transfixing the Village People and even if the Charming Arnold vosu doesn't look like the classic Dusty Rags mummy the film off offers up plenty of lesser mummies to scratch that itch I mentioned that one of the elements that would have been praised at the time of its release would likely be the special effect so it's ironic that those same now dated special effects are the subject of my biggest criticism of the film The Cutting Edge dulls pretty fast in the world of digital effects and there are plenty of moments in this movie that you could point to now 20 years on as distracting in its now rudimentary effect the Saving Grace that nullifies those rougher visual effects that might take you out of the film is the humor and the tone of the movie here's an example of what I mean this scene has Brenan Frasier fighting a bunch of CGI mummies and it looks pretty fakey in my opinion but it also looks very much like Jason and the Argonauts skeleton fight which is a scene has a different less realistic swashbuckling energy that we love Summers also says that he didn't want the old mummy several times in the documentary found on the DVD but the entire design of the mummy and what we're doing with you know the various stages of the mummy and the various mummies it's very '90s it's a a lot of CG work it's not it's not a guy wrapped in bandages there's also no call back to the ton leaves from any of the universal sequels and nothing to tie it to the Hammer movies instead Summers Drew only from the first 1932 movie but was clever in my opinion to keep it in the 1930s which gives it a mythical setting The Mummy Returns 2001 the first mummy movie was a big success and within two years we got a sequel with more fluff and less substance but really no less fun pygmy mummies and airships and new bigger batter villains the studio knew that they had a hit and decided to just pour on more of everything while the first film borrowed almost exclusively from the 1932 mummy this sequel brings its own ideas to the mythology like The Scorpion King but also leans into some of the pre-1 1932 literary mummy tropes with The Reincarnation and pretty female mummies and past lives the new movie really bites off quite a bit Eevee and anox Sonam man get expanded roles imotep returns obviously and as I just mentioned we get the Scorpion King added on top mainly to be a cool new villain but also to springboard off into his own movie and the eells also have a son now as well the kid isn't the worst as far as child actors go but it's also not the direction I would have preferred but the series Embraces a familyfriendly aesthetic and this holds up in that regard even better The Scorpion King himself only appears at the end and is often the target of most criticism of the movie it's almost worthy of a Lucas Style special edition just to fix those rough patches it's just the Rock's face that didn't translate like maybe more time or money would have fixed it but really the technology just wasn't there yet so the big final boss literally looked like Brendan Frasier walked into a video game okay good example of how often the spectacle overtakes any sense of logic a viewer might have is when Brendan Frasier needs to get his son to the temple before the first rays of light touches them and so begins this foot race as the sun creeps up behind them which makes zero sense and I'm not picking on The Mummy Returns here this is one of my favorite movie tropes they also do it in Chronicles of Ric as well light just doesn't work like that to illustrate and imagine this bowl is a valley and the flashlights the Sun and watch the Shadow the light hits the farthest wall first as it rises and then the shadow in the valley recedes it doesn't creep across the valley able to chase people or anything and then we have what a real dawn looks like nothing like immediate light so when would the first rays of light count we just file this little conundrum away with all the vampire light physics that don't make any sense either like in Blade 2 where light instantly charge vampires to a crisp until they need an emotional romantic slow roast for dramatic effect movies are the best The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor now after a number of false starts the third mummy movie in this series came out in 2008 the mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor making a decision to move away from imotep the Dragon Emperor played by jet leaf is the mummy with a Terracotta Army behind him the movie did okay at the box office but was largely panned by critics and audiences two main reasons were the change in director to Rob Cohen who directed The Fast and Furious after Steven Summers passed on the third entry and the second reason is a casting change from Rachel wise to Maria Bella wise wasn't thrilled with the script and bowed out and that's just going to be tough for most fans to accept overall if the final product had been better then maybe it wouldn't have mattered as much but Brendan Frasier bickering in with his 21-year-old son constantly isn't as endearing as maybe intended I think Summers just had a better grip on the tone of these films it's not a total loss though choosing a Chinese mummy and going to a snowy local in Tibet I think all serve to reinvigorate the third entry just maybe not enough abominable yetis are good fun and we do get two legendary performers joining the cast with jetley and Michelle yo though most of their screen time is in the second half especially with jet seeing as he's a a Mudman terracotta mummy for most of the runtime far from their best work it's still pretty enjoyable seeing them Spar on the Great Wall this isn't unwatchable but I think it's one of those movies where you can see how much was in place that was a good idea but how it just didn't quite Excel the way you want it to it was a bold choice to move on from the Egyptian imotep but it showed a lot of Promise most of the cast was on board with another sequel this one to feature an Aztec mummy I would have liked to see that even now with his recent Resurgence Frasier has made comments that he would be open to another go round with the right idea I say do the Aztec mummy and cast a new son to be the new lead like a Hemsworth Tatum type and have Frasier play the Shan connory role try and get wise back if we're still getting Indiana Jones movies then we can have one more turn with Brendan Frasier if he's up for it the mummy franchise also spawned an animated children's show and a spin-off franchise of its own with Scorpion King the TV series ran from for two seasons and a total of 26 episodes and follows the most generic version of The Mummy Returns plot Rick's son Alex gets the bracelet of Anubis stuck on his arm and imotep comes back from the dead to claim it and chases them around the world the second season evolved so Alex was getting trained as a magi but then it was cancelled or ended its run and that was it the other spin-off from The Mummy Returns was of course the Scorpion King in 2002 starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson and its four sequels this is a naked attempt to create a new Conan the Barbarian in the early 2000s there was a sense that The Rock was taking over the action star Throne from Arnold doing a sword and sorcery Adventure movie was one way to pass the vaton this little nod here in the rundown is another fun Chuck Russell is the director who you would know from a decently profitable portfolio of work films like Nightmare on Elm Street 3 The Mask eras and all box office hits and then obscurity for 20 years with no explanation the cast features Kelly who Michael Clark Duncan and Bernard Hill from the Well from me for Lord of the Rings the entire plot is a prequel to The Mummy Returns telling the origin story of the titular character it takes place long before there were pyramids in a sort of Forgotten or unrecorded time similar to Conan the Barbarian the last of his race of acadians Mias played by the rock is after the warlord named mnon who murdered his people along the way the future Scorpion King builds his Entourage of Sidekicks and allies it just doesn't have any Majesty it feels very contemporary the way everybody speaks and the soundtrack that doesn't feature anywhere during the film's runtime but the closing credits certainly that doesn't help God Smack Seven Dust Creed cold chamber Rob Zombie System of a Down and pod it's a new metal paradise and I don't say that sarcastically these are legit good bands and songs here but just not in the movie and maybe not the best fit for the movie while these movies spin out of the Mummy franchise they don't actually have a mummy in any of them though they do share the same universe or continuity although the connections are very few and far between and also way for thin as we will see so let's go through these quickly just so you get the gist Scorpion King 2 so The Scorpion King was a prequel to The Mummy taking place thousands of years earlier telling us a story of The Scorpion King before he was the king the sequel is yet another prequel telling us a young Scorpion King story it's directed by Russell mahe which gives this direct to video release some competency behind the camera the production budget must be a fraction of the first and boasts almost zero star power unless you're a Randy Couture fan and yet this movie is far more ambitious than the first we get little 12-year-old Scorpion King we get a minur we see a sort of tribute to the Mario Bava uh Hercules in The Haunted World where they travel to the Underworld the scope of this movie is much larger still it's a bit long and not as great as it attempts to be although it does attempt to one up The Mummy Returns awful CG Scorpion King monster and uh yeah Scorpion King 3 so you know how in the first movie The Rock isn't The Scorpion King until the end of the film and in the second film it takes place before that even so he wasn't The Scorpion King in that one well in the third movie we start after the events of the first movie at the end of the first 2002 movie Kelly who gives a prophecy that his peaceful peaceful Kingdom wouldn't last I don't know if you remember that but this movie starts after her death and his kingdom has fallen into a plague so he's not really the Scorpion King again until the end of this movie maybe this entry is directed by the direct to video sequel King of the 2010's r renie uh or Ry Man with the Iron Fist 2 The Marine 2 Hard Target 2 Death Race 2 and Death Race 3 this movie has a better cast uh at least with Ron Pearlman Tamora Morrison Billy Zayn Kimbo Slice and David Batista it also features The Book of the Dead as a main plot point which is the same Book of the Dead from the mummy so there's that connection I think aside from his appearances in The Mummy Returns this is the only other connection to the mummy movies Scorpion King 4 came out in 2015 and it's more of the same only cheesier even though he claims his mantle as king at the end of the third movie apparently he gives it up so he can Adventure some more this time the cast features Michael Bean L fno ruer Hower Barry Bostwick Esme biano and Dawn the dragon Wilson it's more of what you've come to expect from this direct to video series okay even I can't believe there are five Scorpion King movies but here we are they changed the casting again and really what's the weirdest part of all the movies is they're all about him rejecting the mantle of scorpion King he's almost never the king of anything and when people tell him that he's the king he denies it he looks koi or he ends the movie and moves on with another sequel if you've gotten yourself three or four movies in you might as well finish the run with the fifth there's a lot of little neat bits of business going on there's a homunkulus or Gollum or whatever he is that's pretty cool it was all right so here's the breakdown if you want five Scorpion King movies and for directec to video releases and that sounds good to you then I think you're going to be moderately satisfied moderately and if you think the first one looks stupid or you saw it and thought it was stupid then understand you're at the Mountain's Peak and it's all downhill from that point on now right before we hop off the Steven Summer's mummy franchise and move over to the Tom Cruz mummy I just want to add that if you got through the Brendan Frasier adventures and wished there was a little bit more might I remind us all that we did get van heling and while it's a poor substitute for The Mummy it is directed by Summers and gives us a run through of his ideas and takes on the remaining classic Universal monsters van Hing is played by Hugh Jackman as he hunts down monsters like Dr jaekel and Mr Hyde Dracula Frankenstein werewolves Etc it's not the best but it's not the worst either there is also a straight to video animated prequel that was less worth watching but exists nonetheless I'm going to end this chapter with the mummy reboot of 2017 this was supposed to be Universal's attempt at a connected Cinematic Universe with all their classic movie monster franchises called The Dark Universe so like the Marvel movies where they're all connected but with Dracula Frankenstein Wolfman Etc when Dracula Untold when that movie seemed like it was a false start they decided to make this Tom Cruz movie the new Ground Zero but it wasn't even Subzero here is subzero now plain Theo it's kind of like three kings meets underworld if you couldn't make that Unholy Alliance work in your mind the filmmakers certainly couldn't Cruz plays a cocky mischievous 50-year-old sergeant in Iraq who would rather Chase skirts than take his job seriously but ends up finding a mummy instead he has a sidekick that when killed becomes a rotting ghost in his mind straight out of an American werewolf in London which is my favorite part of that movie but the mummy doesn't pull it off because the humor doesn't really come across in my opinion it's just an ill-fitting sweater the role that Cruz plays doesn't sit right not his age his attitude it's not believable not the forced humor not the hodge podge of genre blending none of it it's supposed to be dark and edgy but then is too afraid to step away from the comedy and family fun angle the franchise had become with the Frasier era the magic of that balance between humor and horror is tough and a testament to Steven Summer's vision for the franchise or the magic that makes American Werewolf in London so incredible word on the street is that Tom Cruz had huge creative control and pairing him with a novice director was a recipe for Cruz to chew his food for him that's a terrible metaphor who makes a recipe to chew food moving on moving on rumors circulated that Cruz reworked the script to add more of him and less of the title monster extra subplots and his being mentally controlled by the mummy the director Alex curtzman comes from the lindeloff orc Abrams Camp of guys who dominate the first two-thirds of any story they devis but can't ever seem to stick the landing the whole movie isn't a total wash but most of it is there are some cool ideas on the edges superficial stuff ideas that could have been more interesting in a better film lady mummy's a cool twist double iris is a neat design underwater zombie chase was a nice visual but aside from nice visual elements the movie leaves you unmoved moved the teaser ending is especially sour knowing that they put all their eggs into this one basket and that's the second chapter and aborted third chapter of Universal's mummy franchises I'm sure there will be more on the way soon enough but until then we have now covered the entirety of Universal's mummy entries if you are scratching your head and thinking that we didn't cover the classic black and white mummy movies then you should watch part one of the series and if you're all caught up the next chapter we're going back in to look at the Aztec mummy movies catch you on the flip-flop