The Mummy
Directed by: Alex Kurtzman
Written by: David Koepp and Christopher McQuarrie and Dylan Kussman
Starring: Tom Cruise, Annabelle Wallis, Sofia Boutella, Russell Crowe, Jake Johnson, Courtney B. Vance, Marwan Kenzari
Action/Adventure/Fantasy - 110 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 7 Jun 2017
Written by: David Koepp and Christopher McQuarrie and Dylan Kussman
Starring: Tom Cruise, Annabelle Wallis, Sofia Boutella, Russell Crowe, Jake Johnson, Courtney B. Vance, Marwan Kenzari
Action/Adventure/Fantasy - 110 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 7 Jun 2017
The Universal Pictures monster canon of the early 1930s set the rules and established monster movie themes, narratives, and audience expectations. Bela Lugosi as Dracula (1931) is my personal favorite but that does not diminish how much I enjoyed Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Invisible Man (1933). These were not the first horror movies ever made; the silent films The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922) usually get the credit for kicking off the genre. However, nobody dresses up as Dr. Caligari’s monster on Halloween.
Concerning The Mummy, Boris Karloff was a sympathetic Imhotep as he stalked a woman he considered to be his long, lost lover. Abbott and Costello met the mummy in 1955, Christopher Lee gave it a turn in 1959, and still fresh in the minds of those of us in at least our 30s, Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz battled variations of the Egyptian undead a couple times in the late ‘90s. Oh, how I miss the wacky action sequences and terrible puns of those films; at least the ones before The Scorpion King (2002). Watching Tom Cruise (Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation) wake up the latest version of the mummy and then spend two hours trying to put her back in the box is not as fun as the Fraser films and elicits far less feeling than Karloff’s version. The Mummy comes off as a stereotypical cartoon mummy: arms straight out front, mumbling, and a plodding shuffle as it creeps forward.
Concerning The Mummy, Boris Karloff was a sympathetic Imhotep as he stalked a woman he considered to be his long, lost lover. Abbott and Costello met the mummy in 1955, Christopher Lee gave it a turn in 1959, and still fresh in the minds of those of us in at least our 30s, Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz battled variations of the Egyptian undead a couple times in the late ‘90s. Oh, how I miss the wacky action sequences and terrible puns of those films; at least the ones before The Scorpion King (2002). Watching Tom Cruise (Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation) wake up the latest version of the mummy and then spend two hours trying to put her back in the box is not as fun as the Fraser films and elicits far less feeling than Karloff’s version. The Mummy comes off as a stereotypical cartoon mummy: arms straight out front, mumbling, and a plodding shuffle as it creeps forward.
Writers David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, and Dylan Kussman may have looked at X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) for inspiration. Descend down a hole found on accident, awaken an ancient being in an atmosphere overtly designed to warn future generations not to disturb the thing buried here, and then run around yelling at each other a bunch about how best to get the very irritable supernatural being back to sleep. Even Russell Crowe (The Nice Guys), who shows up as the notable Dr. Henry Jekyll, repeatedly warns in voiceover, “The past will not stay buried forever.”
Neither will recycled material to base rebooted franchises on. The Mummy is not as egregious as the cinematic torture artists who keep rebooting the Spider-Man franchise, but clearly Universal wants to play catch up. Marvel, technically Disney, is killing it with The Avengers, it’s solo superhero films, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc… In second place, Warner Bros. pumps out Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and later this year, will shuffle them all together ala The Avengers. Not wanting to be left out in the box office desert, Universal aims to reboot the monster franchise. However, will they mash the monsters and their human counterparts into a film after the solo spins? I don’t care.
Tom Cruise plays Nick Morton, an Army recon scout, as the same type of personality as George Clooney played in Three Kings (1999). Morton is not hanging around Mosul, Iraq to fight ISIS; he’s looking for loot to steal and make a buck on the black market. He’s a war profiteer who won’t even let a couple dozen ISIS fighters eager to behead him get in his way. Morton’s conscience is Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword), a blonde Indiana Jones-type archaeologist interested in the historical truth; exactly what shadowy agency she works for is a sub-plot too boring to mention. Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella, Star Trek Beyond) is a female mummy tormenter this time around who sort of apologizes for murdering her father and infant brother 5,000 years ago saying, “Times were different back then.”
I enjoyed Boutella as the mummy. She sucks the life force out of humans with what looks like a clinical French kiss, makes the same face in the sand as Imhotep did in the previous film series, and can make her irises double from two to four. What this does to her vision is left to our imaginations; director Alex Kurtzman, known for rebooting Star Trek, Spider-Man, and Transformers, never shows us what the point of all the eyeballs are even though he shows the transformation a couple times. Boutella shines because this isn’t her first rodeo as the female fighter with a chip on her shoulder. She was the woman with swords on her legs in Kingsman: The Secret Service and the alien Jaylah in Star Trek Beyond.
I do not have as many kind words for Annabelle Wallis. Wallis’ archaeologist character shrieks a lot, becomes the damsel in distress three too many times, and for some reason makes Nick Morton act completely out of character to keep saving her life. Perhaps Jenny Halsey’s character development suffered a bit because all eyes were on Ahmanet, as your eyes will be too. Russell Crowe as Jekyll is more afterthought and if you think I haven’t written enough about Tom Cruise, that’s because there isn’t much to say. This isn’t Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible. It’s not even lame Ethan Hunt in John Woo’s Mission: Impossible 2. There is nothing inherently wrong with rebooting the iconic Universal monsters; everyone else is getting away with it. Yet fashioning films as sleek as Iron Man or as cheeky as Guardians of the Galaxy is not as easy for monsters with certain limitations. Calling their new film combinations Dark Universe, rather than just Universal Pictures, is not going to automatically open the wallets of the Marvel faithful and DC Comics acolytes. Universal may be in trouble here.
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