Sphinx

Badly written adaptation of a bad novel and a badly directed film that relies on exotic locations and glitzy set decoration, featuring a beautiful "Egyptologist" who has never before been to Egypt, who takes a taxi from the Nile Hilton to the Cairo Museum (next door to each other), and goes into the tomb of Tutankhamun with a Polaroid camera to "do research". (If the public does not understand why this is laughable, they deserve this film). The title "Sphinx" has nothing to do with the plot, which is loosely about the discovery of a lost tomb. Not exactly PC because all the "good" Egyptians are played by Europeans and the "bad" Egyptians are played by Egyptians. In the opening credits the cast names are spelled out in hieroglyphs, which seems to be the extent of the research wasted on this turkey.

Erica Baron travels to Egypt to search for the lost treasure of Tutencamin. Once there she finds treachery and secrets are very common as she searches for the treasure. Who can she trust to help her?

This is a very dull archaeology movie, made before Indiana Jones made it all very much more lively. However this has a reasonable plot involving several twists and double crosses - some of which you'll see coming and some you won't, though don't get your hopes up, the twists are earth shattering but merely double crosses and the like. However it's delivered with so little life or excitement that I started to get bored and only really noticed the plot whenever a new character came in or something like that. When you think about the story afterwards you realise that the plot was actually quite interesting but that the delivery seemed to suck all life out of it.

Another problem is the actors. First of all the two leads are terrible. Lesley-Anne Down is a ridiculous archaeologist! And she is a terrible lead - here all she does is run around in a jump suit with groomed hair screaming and running, running and screaming, finding a statute, running, screaming etc. Also it is very irritating the way that she looks down at Arabs as savages. In fact almost all the Arab characters in this film are portrayed as bad men or savages when compared to the white, angelic Down - the few trustworthy Arabs being played by white or western actors, such as Sir John Gielguld. Frank Langella gives a drab, uninteresting performance as Khazzan. He manages to show almost no emotion and only one facial expression throughout the film - as a mysterious romantic character he totally fails.

Overall an interesting story is delivered with all the excitement of a traffic jam and is spoilt by a bad performance by an actress better suited to TV movies, an actor that is almost totally without character and a support cast that are portrayed as savages. Go watch Indiana Jones instead.

Sphinx isn't the greatest movie about Egypt, but it is somewhat entertaining. I'd probably buy it if it came out on DVD, but it wouldn't be my first choice. It's worth it to watch Leslie Ann Down, she's not the smartest Egyptologist, but she's still very easy on the eyes.

Okay, so Sphinx is not a great movie, but it's not a bad one, either. Funnily enough, with better film craft, it would be no worse than Raiders of the Lost Ark given they traffic in a lot of the same cliches. But that movie had a comic book nostalgia that gave it energy this film lacks. Without the window dressing, all that's left is the simplistic story. Notice I said story. There's not much here in terms of that, but there's a lot of plot. The characters never seem to tire of doing and saying any number of things to keep the movie going. Some are more interesting than others.

Leslie-Anne Warren, who looks particularly lovely here, plays an Egyptologist who gets pulled into various factions of graverobbers hoping to loot ancient Egyptian treasures. If you're a fan of old movies, you've seen this set up a million times before, the difference being this movie tries hard -- mistakenly -- to give it some solemnity that all those cliffhangers in the 1930s and 1940s did not. There's really no need. This is escapism, not drama, something that by the 1970s and 1980s, the people making the movies had forgotten.

Take Steven Spielberg. Like author Stephen King, he just recycled stuff we've seen a million times before. But Spielberg gave it a bit more gloss, turning B movie ideas in expensive amusement park rides that worked especially on audiences born in the 1950s and 1960s. The biggest problem with Sphinx is director Franklin Schaffner, a remarkably workmanlike filmmaker who somehow hit it big with some pseudo epics like Planet of the Apes and Patton. Now, even if you're a fan of no-nonsense, traditional directing, you'll notice how Schaffner seems to have little style or imagination.

The result is Sphinx often looks nice in terms of pure photography but lacks many of the components of great escapism. Add to it some sloppy editing that makes the story hard to follow, and you're left with a good idea never quite done.

Lesley-Ann Down is an Egyptologist making her first trip to Egypt, fascinated by the Carter Expedition. A statue vanishes, and she goes on a search for it, with lots of locals, like Frank Langella, John Gielgud, and John Rhy-Davies showing up as she heads down to Luxor.

It's a very slow-moving film, with the magnificent camerawork of Ernest Day and Claude Renoir up and down the Nile valley keeping things visually interesting, if not always in terms of plot. There are vistas of scree, with a single magnificent building on it around Luxor, apparently, with the green of the river's shore a distant promise. Director Franklin Schaffner may have been the cat;'s pajamas as the 1960s ended and the 1970s began, but he was in a slide here; his next movie would be YES, GIORGIO.