Mummies

A children's animated film, re-dubbed from Spanish and released to UK theatres in time for the Easter holidays, Mummies is entertaining enough but that is unlikely to translate to anything more significant.

While the Rosetta Stone was initially considered unique, there are partial copies of the same decree and three earlier sets of text commanded by Ptolemy V. In a similar vein, Epic Tails from earlier this year takes something roughly like the past and makes of it something roughly contemporary, with mixed impact. The utility of that revelatory rock was in its repetition, the same set of dated references again and again.

A character's ringtone is the violin stab from the score of Hitchock's Psycho, and while it's assigned to their mother I find myself wondering who among its intended audience will have consumed Bernard Herrmann's score in that work or if they'll have absorbed it as cultural background radiation. I think I caught a Wilhelm scream. There's a record scratch too, and while sales of vinyl (in the US, per the RIAA) overtook CDs in 2022, after 37 years of second-place, it's probable that even the parents who have dragged or have been dragged along to this won't have heard one outwith cinema where its onomatopoeic skeuomorphic resonance makes it a cliché. That cliché is one of those too is worth about as much as the papyrus it is written on.

Jordi Gassull, Javier Barreira, Juan Galochahave had their films translated in this way before. 2017's Tad The Lost Explorer got similar treatment. This has been hanging around for a few years awaiting release, its production extended by a variety of factors. That waiting hasn't necessarily added any good things, but it is with deliberately faint praise that I say I've seen worse.

Joe Thomas is Thut, a charioteer who has to overcome a fear. Eleanor Tomlinson (with Karina Pasian doing her singing) is Nefer, a princess who wants to escape the strictures of royal life. Santiago Winder is Sekhem, Thut's little brother and architect (via boomerang) of accidental romance. Hugh Bonneville was presumably given some scenery to chew when he wasn't channelling John Cleese as Basil Fawlty, and Sean Bean brings Sheffield by way of Sharm El Sheikh as the Pharoah. Bonneville voices "Lord Carnaby", a character whose motivation to make his name known is slightly undercut by it being on a museum, shipping crates, and, though not directly referenced in a montage, that sees Nefer wearing a black and white dress that bears a (Mary) quantum of similarity to those of the swinging Sixties shopping street.

Bringing the ever-living (or un-living, or un-dead, it's never quite clear) to London for adventure is hardly new. A Hammer (horror) in the nail of the coffin of originality, even if the consequences of bright white lights bear more of a resemblance to Coco or Pirates Of The Caribbean than anything that'd make a classically trained actor blanche. The Egyptian-ness of it appears to mostly be an excuse for 'jokes' predicated upon poses, I counted at least five, at least two uses of The Bangles track that isn't Manic Monday, and a nose falling off. There's some overbearing expository vexillology, but that's far from the only leaden thing to flag.

I didn't hate it. Some incredibly flat line readings didn't help. "I'm your brother and you will obey me" was presumably meant to be climactic but was tonally abject, and what I think was a Nickelback song was much the same. I'm not even going to question what tranquiliser one brings for putting down those who have defied Anubis to catch a Clapham Omnibus. Well as it's a 40 I think it's actually the Dulwich to Clerkenwell. Looking that up it does actually cross the river, just not at Embankment or the London Eye, and the last time I was on it I went to see an exhibit of original Moomins artwork and remembering that I realise I'd much rather watch anything Moomins than Mummies.

It's got some original songs, which I remember nothing of, it's got some poor archaeological practise that's probably explained by the involvement of both baddies and a robot crab burglar. Anyone looking to labour the already tedious 'joke' that Sean Bean dies in movies can take heart (and put it in a canopic jar) that all the mummies are explicitly unalive, even if their English is good enough to participate in a stage production of Aida. Product placement for Egyptair would possibly be less clunky if one didn't find oneself wondering (as with Toy Story 2 or Love Actually) at how misrepresented airport security procedures seem to be.

At the very very beginning, or at least enough after Ra (and maybe Atum) rocked up, the film opens with the words "A long time ago..." in blue letters on a black background. That's not just some words but a fourth dot on the ellipsis short of Star Wars, and 'short of' seems apt. Mummies walks like an asymptote.