The first thing that needs to be said about The Mummy is that it should require a two drink minimum. If you went into this film with a clear head and a relaxed liver, I pity you.

I will say this for The Mummy, however: it gave me hope that there are still some very good writers in Hollywood.

Of course, it did this by taking bits and pieces of said movies written by very good writers and haphazardly compiling them into a mismatched highlights reel the likes of which a monkey with a ThinkPad might have come up with when he got tired of trying to write Hamlet and just decided to start cutting and pasting.

First we have our hero Brendan Fraser, who is essentially a 70/30 blend of Indiana Jones and Ash from the Evil Dead movies. Though this sounds like a combination made in fanboy Heaven, somehow it manages to create a whole that is infinitely less than the sum of its parts. A finer example of counter-synergy has not been seen since the introduction of the Ford Tempo.

We first meet Indy as he is defending the ruins of an ancient city (?) with his army (??) from another army that for some reason seems to want to take it over (???!).

Indy's sidekick Comic Traitor Stereotype runs like a coward instead of fighting like a man, thus screwing up the battle, establishing himself as the Dr. Zachary Smith of the film, and living to see another day.

Enter the delivery from the ingenue factory. Fresh out of the box with styrofoam peanuts still clinging to her hair, we meet Evelyn. In a little piece of character development that would make your ninth grade English teacher openly sob, she is established as the quirky genius by knocking over a library full of bookcases Steve Urkel style, and then talking about how smart she is.

INT. LIBRARY
Under the clumsy hand of EVELYN, seventy-two bookcases topple and fall domino style.

Evelyn - (As the last bookcase smashes to the ground) Did I do thaaaaat?

Pissed off Museum Curator - Jet-sooooooon! Explain to me why it is that I keep you around here again?

Evelyn - Well, I hold a degree in Egyptology and Primitive Cultures of the World from Oxford University, my findings have been published in all of the leading archeological journals, I can decipher and translate ancient texts of seven different religions, in short in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral, I am the very model of a modern Major General.

Pissed off Museum Curator - You're lucky I'm not going to appear in this film again, or I'd fire you.

As if all of this wasn't quite bad enough already, we are then introduced to her brother Jonathan. Eighty percent Xena's Joxer, twenty percent Daffy Duck, entertaining as neither.

Soon Indy, Evelyn, and Joxer are on their way across the desert to find the city of the dead and bring back its treasures, and the audience is on its way to the box office to get back their money.

In the city of the dead, they find Necronomicon Ex Mortis, the book of the dead. Inked in human blood and bound in human flesh, the Necronomicon contained the power to give human form to the evil and let it walk the earth as computer graphics.

Unfortunately, Indy forgets to speak the words when he lifts the book from the cradle, and just like Dr. Knowby before her, Evelyn reads the demon resurrection passages aloud.

From here on out, you get pretty much what you came to see. Indiana Jones/Ash fighting the army of the dead. It's very cool, even though more than a safely coincidental amount of gags were lifted from Army of Darkness. Still, seeing some of my favorite "knocking apart the undead" routines played out with a very large budget was pretty cool.

I wouldn't say that I don't recommend this movie. It does for the adventure/zombie genre what Independence Day did for science fiction, just not as well. It is a Reader's Digest compilation of all of your favorite bits from other movies stuck together in an attempt to save you a little time and a few bucks at Blockbuster.

Ideal viewing: Pick it up on video and watch it while you play co-ed Twister.

Though I can't honestly say that there is a movie where that isn't the ideal viewing.

Okay I've got some issues with the Americans. I can't believe that with Evelyn and Jonathan as the representatives of Great Britain that I can still say that I think that the U.S. were the ones who got the shaft in this film.

These guys were like a bunch of stereotype ninteen year olds working Disney's Frontierland to try to earn enough money to buy a new Del Sol. I half expected them to stand up around the campfire in disgust and yell "Neeew York City!" before ganking the cook.

And perhaps my biggest complaint of all about our North American brethren: they know that the Mummy is coming for them with the intention of killing them and harvesting their precious flapjack nourished bodies for his own carcass, they know that his only weakness is an unholy fear of cats, yet they DON'T just STRAP A BUNCH OF CATS ON THEMSELVES! Does this not seem obvious to anyone else? If Superman wants you dead, you wear kryptonite underwear, right? Come on!

And if that fella in the cave loses his glasses and is suddenly in a Velma-from-Scooby-Doo-like haze of crawling around on the ground and feeling blindly for his specs, then why does the Mummy choose to steal HIS eyes? And more importantly, why do they work for him without glasses?

Sit tight folks, just a few weeks until that big summer picture that everybody's waiting for...

Inspector Gadget.