Egypt is exotic, don't you know

I've got several Egypt-themed movies on my DVR, and I've been trying to go through them at a pace so that I don't have to blog about two of them in quick succession. It looks like it's been a good two months since the last one I did a post on, so now it's time for another: Sphinx.

The movie opens up with a pre-credits sequence set in the Valley of the Kings in ancient Egypt, specifically 3300 years ago. I don't know enough Egyptian history to know what makes this particular point interesting, but the scene involves an architect of a tomb of one of the pharaohs who is being tortured to death, presumably for letting on the secrets of how to get into the tomb the pharaoh is having built. Grave robbers were a big deal back then since the pharaohs buried a substantial amount of wealth with them to accompany them into the after life; naturally, people in this life wouldn't mind having some of that wealth as it would make their lives easier.

After the credits, we go to the present day, or at least cica 1980 when the movie was made. Lesley-Anne Down plays Erica Baron, a British-born American-resident Egyptologist who is in Egypt to do research on Pharaoh Seti I, or at least on Howard Carter, the man who found the tomb but died suddenly like a bunch of other people on his final expedition. That expedition also revealed some historical anomalies, and that seems to be what really interests Erica. (The date given in the opening scene, and the dates given for his reign in Wikipedia, don't coincide.)

Following her work at one of the museums, Erica visits Abdu Hamdi (John Gielgud in a cameo), who deals in antiquities and supposedly knows something about them, but is more of a forger who makes fake antiquities to sell to unsuspecting people. Well, not all of them are unsuspecting. At the end of her visit, Abdu Hamdi gives her a book to take to Luxor as he claims not to trust the mail. Erica stays behind a bit and sees Abdu Hamdi get stabbed to death. She has to beat a hasty retreat as she realizes the people who murdered Abdu Hamdi are looking for something there, and eventually looking for her.

One can guess that they're looking for the book that Abdu Hamdi gave to Erica, but what's in that book that's so valuable? Erica is in danger for the rest of the movie, and a recurring theme is her crossing paths with people who are not really dangerous to her. The ultimate plot deals with people who are trying to keep the antiquities for themselves, rather than having the antiquities be part of the world's cultural heritage -- or something like that.

The big problem with Sphinx is that it's an absolute mess of a movie. It's slow, feels utterly confusing as to what's going on, and also gives the impression of people who knew nothing about ancient or modern Egypt -- or had a view of the place frozen in the time of Howard Carter's find of King Tut's tomb -- trying to write about the place. The result is a movie that has a bit of nice location shooting, but that's about all that's going for it.