The Mummy and important life lessons

The Mummy (1999) is just your run of the mill campy action/adventure flick from a time when Hollywood still produced actually entertaining movies of that genre. Anyway I still like watching it for nostalgia purposes...but more than that I like that movies even just 20-25 years ago tried to impart some important life lessons....in this particular movie it’s the story of the film’s weasel antagonist Beni Gabor, portrayed by Kevin O’Connor.

Beni is a coward right from the start...but it is the manner of How he meets his end that the movie tries to impart on us the virtue of not succumbing to greed. Beni goes along with helping the Mummy out of sheer self preservation at first and then growing greed. It is the latter characteristic that costs him his life. Rather than be content with his bags of Gold and jewels and walking away...Beni gets tempted to go back into Hamunaptra’s underground Labyrinth’s to get more. It proves to be a fatal mistake that leads him to trigger a pressurized sand booby trap...that ultimately leaves him trapped underground and surrounded by flesh eating scarabs...that proceed to devour him.

Ever since I saw this movie as a kid I’ve been influenced considerably about the extremely detrimental effects of Greed.

On a side note the film’s protagonist Rick O’Connell portrayed by Brendan Fraser showed his truly great qualities as he tried saving Beni even at the very end...the very same Beni that had betrayed him several times and had aided the Mummy in hunting Rick’s party.

Too bad they don’t make movies like this anymore. It would be a good combination of entertainment and life lessons being taught.