I am deeply offended by this! I was reading thoughts on what D&D classes the characters of The Mummy (1999) would be, and there was a comment that Jonathan was obviously a rogue, but either a badly built one or one with shit dice rolls. And! Excuse you? Jonathan is a perfectly acceptable rogue! He rolls fine when he’s actually attempting to do something!
In the first movie alone, some of his greatest hits:
Successfully pickpocketed Rick on their first meeting, without Rick so much as joining the dots until later.
Survives a pitched battle on a burning ship without a scratch, and somehow gets the key from a burning hook-handed enemy mook in the process. (“And did I panic? I think not!”)
Survives a pitched battle in the Hamunaptra ruins while drunk, through liberal use of cover and picking off targets at range.
Rolls a Nat 20 on his deception check to avoid being massacred by a large group of hynotised enemies in the museum.
Survives the final pitched battle with the undead (again, through liberal use of cover, hiding and running).
Successfully makes his intelligence roll to translate the Book of Amun Ra (with the Help action from Evie).
Successfully uses the resulting control over the undead mooks to even out the battlefield, including the genius brain move of sending them after Ankh-Su-Namun to both save Evie and distract Imhotep.
Successfully pickpockets a lich while being strangled by him to regain the key and enable Evie to use the book to banish Imhotep altogether.
Yes, he’s fairly flimsy in direct battle, and if at all possible refuses to get to melee range with anybody. So he’s a ranged rogue, and has a tendency to use the environment to his advantage. But he’s clearly designed around Sleight of Hand, Charisma, and a decent sprinkling of Intelligence, and prefers to use object interactions and battlefield control to even out his odds. For all that, though, he fully will stay in melee range if he has no other choice, and take the opportunity to pickpocket the BBEG while he’s at it.
He's a perfectly serviceable rogue, he’s just not optimised for straight combat. And even there, as the second movie shows, he’s excellent at ranged combat. He just doesn’t like getting up close and personal.
