The Mummy (2017)

Warning: this one’s gonna be particularly grumpy, snarky, and perhaps even downright rude!

I have to say, before watching this abomination, I felt a little for poor Universal. After all, the company is so late out of the gate for its own movie universe (which is called “Dark Universe” for good reason, seeing as how much the film at hand disapproves of using colours or light), all the good talent in front and behind the camera willing to invest their time and abilities into a concept this corporate has already been grabbed by the competition, so seemingly the only creatives still for hire are those without the talent or conviction to make anything of their own or to get hired by anyone but Universal. Apologies to the people involved who weren’t actually responsible because they were mind-controlled by alien wasps or something in that line.

That’s at least how I explain The Mummy to myself; it is definitely not explicable as anything the people involved put even a tiny bit of their hearts and minds in, resulting in a film as bland and drab as this sort of blockbuster can possibly get. Why, I’d even prefer a Michael Bay movie – those things are at least loud, tacky and dumb, whereas The Mummy really can’t find enough enthusiasm to even be any of that.

The writing – an effort that took at least the six credited minds, apparently – is bland, perfunctory and not just assumes the audience to be stupid but thinks we are actual zombies. How else to explain the film’s tendency to repeat certain micro flashbacks again and again, never mind it is flashing back to scenes that happened only fifteen minutes earlier, or that it’ll use the same flashbacks again in another twenty. “Remember that dagger we told you about ten minutes ago, and thirty minutes ago, and forty minutes ago, monkeys? I’m sure you don’t, so let me reiterate via micro flashback!”. It’s not just an offensive, exasperating and tedious way to tell – or rather repeatedly exposit about – a  story, it also again and again stops the film in its tracks when it threatens to actually start going.

Then there’s of course the little problem that the script is supposedly about a charming rogue finding redemption through an act of sacrifice but never actually manages to establish him as anything but an asshole, or rather, believes that giving a woman in a crashing plane a parachute is a clear sign of his buried humanity, or that falling in love is. Cough, Eva Braun, cough. Let’s not even talk about that self-sacrifice which isn’t even one, or about the way the romantic triangle is written. Or rather, not written. Or about the weird plot omissions, the rather important plot elements a film this exposition heavy somehow still doesn’t explain (probably because it’s too concerned with repeating crap even a Hollywood director would understand four or five times for its oh so stupid audience).

On the side of just strange – instead of mind-numbingly bad – things about the script, there is a bunch of borrowings, throw-backs or downright idea theft (depending on a viewer’s tolerance for this sort of thing) from other, much superior, movies, particularly Tobe Hooper’s wonderful Lifeforce and John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London. I have no idea what to make of that; but then, I have no idea how anyone involved in the movie can have thought anything about it was a good idea.

Not that there’s much spectacle going around to distract one from the script’s failings, either. The big action set pieces lack any imagination, are indifferently staged, blandly directed by Alex Kurtzmann (whom I now have under suspicion of being a robot, so mechanical is his work here, though the rumour mill suggests Tom Cruise steamrolled him with good old fashioned box office magnet power and is in fact responsible for this crap), and edited with a nearly absurd lack of style and enthusiasm. Given the budget involved, you’d at least expect a visible degree of craftsmanship, but there’s little sign of where the 125 to 150 million dollar budget actually went. Even the lighting and the music are bland and drab like ugly, grey little table cloths.


Well, a not inconsiderable part of the budget certainly went into the pockets of Tom Cruise, giving his worst performance of the last ten years or so. Cruise’s outing consists of GIF-worthy grimaces, wooden dialogue delivery (admittedly, the dialogue is pretty wretched anyway, so even an actor couldn’t have improved on it much), and an astonishing lack of screen presence. Cruise also doesn’t have the tiniest bit of chemistry with his female co-actors, which is a bit of a problem that’s supposed to be some sort of supernatural love triangle. To be fair to the old man, Annabelle Wallis’s performance is nearly as bad as Cruise’s – she’s just not grimacing as much – just barely less wooden as whatever it was Bryce Dallas Howard did in Jurassic World. Russell Crowe (as Jekyll and Hyde) for his part waddles through his scenes clearly in search of his pay check so that he can finally leave the set. The only thespian on screen who is actually putting effort in is Sofia Boutella as our titular mummy but she suffers from the fact that the film as a whole doesn’t really seem to have much of an idea what to do with her, and the need to interact with the living void Cruise. She’s a good villain in desperate search of a better film, or really, any film at all.