When first glimpsed in a pre-title sequence that could easily be the opening number in 'Prince of Egypt' that is to say, a Universal imitation of a DreamWorks imitation of Disney imitating Cecil B. Our mummy is the South African actor Arnold Vosloo, playing the Egyptian priest Imhotep. It certainly lacks the grandeur of the original from 1932, which starred the great Boris Karloff. The movie is fast and furious, shallow, empty, casually racist, merry, jaunty, silly and utterly weightless. It's simply an invitation to watch Brendan Fraser blast dusty, smoky holes in shambling apparitions as they come at him in a cellarlike Egyptian treasure chamber. And anyway, most of the last half of the movie has nothing to do with either bald guys or mummies but with that first-person shooter game called Doom. How well would you expect a movie called 'Bald Guy' to do? These people are not in business to lose money. Still, it's difficult to hold this against Universal Studios.

That's what you find in the all-but-mummyless 'Mummy.' Almost no mummies, one very large bald guy. I don't know why, your bald guy is usually a strangler. On the other hand, bald guy movies have some sleek oily grief merchant intimidating with the strength of his glare and the crown of his dome, and then he usually strangles people. Rotting linen bandages by the mile are mandatory.

Here are the rules: Mummy movies have a slow-walking, rotting, undead cadaver stumbling around, crushing people. Rachel Weisz and Brendan Fraser recoil in horror of 'The Mummy.'

The mummy 1999 watch