Watching The Mummy -- the latest reboot of the classic Hollywood monster -- I couldn't help but recall a re-imagining of a similar classic Hollywood monster, 2014's Dracula Untold. Bashed by critics as a poor attempt at "superhero-izing" Dracula, it was largely recognised as a bad film, one that would most likely be better off with a stake in its metaphorical heart.
Like that film, The Mummy is another of Hollywood's attempts at jumping on the lucrative bandwagon of the superhero genre, presenting itself as a generic superhero origin story in an attempt to set up Universal Studios' Dark Universe franchise of monster films. The Mummy turns out to be another generic super-villain, while the hero -- Tom Cruise -- pulls a deus ex machina and predictably beats the bad guy (or girl, in this case) in one blow. The result is a film that, to be honest, isn't un-fun, even if I was just going through the motions by the end of it.
The Mummy begins by introducing us to Tom Cruise's lovable rogue Nick Morton, a highly-decorated soldier with secret tendencies towards thievery and looting. While on a mission in Iraq, Morton happens to stumble upon an underground Egyptian cavern, which houses Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), an evil Egyptian princess who made a deal with the Egyptian god of death for power to overthrow her father as pharaoh. Caught and buried alive for 5,000 years, Ahmanet curses Morton, choosing him as the sacrifice she needs to summon the aforementioned death-god into the mortal realm.
Like all movies with a bandaged, undead Egyptian monster on its cover, The Mummy begins with a tomb looting, only this time, it's upped the ante by making it two simultaneous tombs instead of just one. It has a half-demon (and actually very attractive) Egyptian princess for a mummy. It has an ancient Templar tomb in underground London. It has a secret, demon-hunting organisation led by Dr Jekyll (of Jekyll and Hyde, portrayed by Russel Crowe) himself, trying to summon Satan into the world in order to kill him forever. In other words, it's a mess. In trying to set up its universe, The Mummy leaps from one scene to another, without much background context or depth to its characters to fully realise everything it sets out to do.
Cruise's Morton, for example, is introduced as a likeable con-man type, who is willing to lie and cheat for personal gain, even if he is a good person at heart. However, the film never truly dedicates any time to exploring the variations in Morton's various personas, instead opting to swing wildly from one to the other in order to squeeze out comedy moments. We never really get to develop the relationship between Cruise's Morton and archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), which makes some of the later parts seem unreasonable.
Meanwhile, we never get a real picture of Jekyll's monster-hunting organisation, or of Jekyll himself -- as infinitely watchable as Russell Crowe is. But the worst to suffer from the film's rapid pacing seems to be The Mummy, or princess Ahmanet herself. While her initial motivations seemed to try and establish her as a sympathetic villain, trying to get back what was supposed to be hers, she quickly devolves into a one-note villain who wants to bring about world-destruction for no real reason. She feels more like a plot-device than a character, and that's always a bad trait to have in a villain.
All of this may have been easier to overlook if The Mummy at least succeeded at delivering the right atmosphere and balance of horror and action, though it fails to follow-through on both accounts. While the first scenes in a Gothic English church look and feel appropriately "horror-ish" (if not actually scary), the following parts of the film take place largely in modern, city environments or a drab stone tomb, which ultimately don't work to establish any sort of tension or dread. The action, meanwhile, is largely non-stop. You'll see Cruise and his friends do a lot of running, driving and just getting thrown around in general. The action doesn't exactly measure up to actual "superhero" standards, at least until the last 20 minutes or so, when Cruise's character suddenly goes through a predictable shift which allows him to beat The Mummy and save the girl.
It probably isn't much of a surprise to most people, but The Mummy is the kind of film you watch on a lazy weekend, splayed on the couch with nothing better to do. It's ultimately not unwatchable, the same way mindless action flicks aren't unwatchable, but it's definitely not the kind of movie you'd ever expect to amount to anything much.
The Mummy
Starring Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe, Annabelle Wallis, Sofia Boutella Directed by Alex Kurtzman
