The movie itself is just so-so. An eager young Brendan Fraser leads a cast of interchangeable movie stereotypes through their paces. His Rick O'Connell is a Foreign Legion soldier with a knack for blasting handguns out of both fists and a yen for the treasure hidden in the tomb of Egyptain high priest Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo), which he's inadvertantly stumbled across on an archeological dig. He's aided by pretty Evelyn (Rachel Weisz), an English librarian with a knack for Egyptology, and her dotty brother Jonathan (John Hannah). Their antagonists include Beni (Kevin J. O'Connor), a weasely local guide who's leading another party of treasure hunters on a quest for the same booty, and, of course, the titular mummy himself.

Imhotep, see, committed a great transgression back in the day. Specifically, he screwed around with Pharoah's voluptuous, half-dressed mistress Anck-Su-Namun (Patricia Velasquez) and then helped her kill Pharoah Himself. You'd think any old dummy would realize that this is A Bad Idea, and Imhotep's punishment really drives the point home -- he's mummified alive, and buried in his sarcophagus with about a jillion ravenous scarab beetles. Naturally, many centuries later, our intrepid librarian accidentally utters the very words that will wake Imhotep from his rather uncomfortable slumber. The reanimated Imhotep -- whose dessicated, computer-generated body resembles a EC comic book come to life -- is obsessed with his centuries-ago lover and plans to tap the life force of a contemporary equivalent (specifically, Evelyn) to bring her back to life.

But it's never clear just what kind of villain Imhotep is, anyway. Vosloo plays him as a routine Hollywood heavy, which makes it sort of hard for us to identify with his tragedy -- a crucial element of the 1932 original. At times, he seems wildly powerful -- he apparently brings the Biblical plagues (a couple of them, anyway) back to the lost city of Hamunaptra, and can create a huge, swirling sandstorm large enough to swallow a twin-prop plane -- so why can't he knock off some pesky amateur archeologists?

The Mummy exhibits a passing familiarity of just about every trope of the adventure movie, including the damsel in distress, the narrow escape from quicksand, and the dashing hero with a smart mouth. Other touches are distinctly modern, such as the high-decibel gunplay and the over-reliance on computer-generated chills. Yes, the mummy looks cool, but he moves like the stop-motion cyborg at the end of The Terminator. It's a jarring break from the style established by the rest of the movie. In the film's last reel, a cheerful Ray Harryhausen tribute-cum-knockoff, we finally get some rousing swordplay involving a veritable army of reanimated mummies who must be sliced and diced by our hero. That's fun stuff, but it takes close to two hours of lame dialogue, leaden exposition, and glib wisecracks to get there.

Re-reading that plot synopsis, I notice that The Mummy sounds like loads of fun. The big problem may be that this film is just off-balance. Had Sommers paced his first half more efficiently, he would have had more time to stretch out and develop his characters after things got cranking, rather than before. Imhotep, for instance, makes an effective but brief appearance beneath robes and a mask in one scene, and I was hoping to see more of him skulking around among the humans, plotting his revenge.

Instead, Sommers has made a big-budget Hollywood picture that tries to get by with the care and plotting of a low-budget knock-off. When he applied this B-movie technique to Deep Rising, it made for a mildly pleasant surprise. The second time around, when he pulls essentially the same stunt with infinitely more resources at his disposal, it's a disappointment. Maybe easy access to so much computer hardware makes him a lazy screenwriter -- here's a movie that relies exclusively on cgi for its action scenes and fright effects. But I get the feeling Sommers will be around for a while -- he obviously has a knack for monster movies, and lots of experience handling computer animation -- so it will be interesting to see how his narrative sensibility develops.