This movie
deserved the Razzie nominations it got.
I felt like I was watching Mission Impossible mixed with a bit
of Indiana Jones. Let’s be honest, there’s little to expect in a mummy
movie. You’ll expect a raggedy old mummy, some mystic powers, and a deep
thriller. All of that we can easily get from the first Mummy flick
done in 1932.
The only way to
make it different is to add something new, which the Brendan Fraser movies (the
first two) starring Rachel Weisz did. The Mummy (1999), the first in
the Fraser trilogy, had wit, romance, and an exceptional comedic cast. Those
additional factors made the movie exceptionally good and inviting to watch
anytime. The second movie, The Mummy Returns (2001), just rode on the
first, trying to increase the intensity of the exceptional cast and making sure
we didn’t forget Imhotep that easily.
This new Mummy movie,
however, just washes away very quickly. Universal Studios ended up being what
DC is—struggling to create a universe that can rival Marvel. Instead of
learning from Marvel, they tried to do it the DC way: connect all the dots in
one movie.
It didn’t work
for DC, and it didn’t work for Universal here either. In this movie, we’re
meant to be introduced to the Dark Universe, where Universal’s classic monsters
live. Our lead in this movie, the man who’s supposed to kick things off, is Tom
Cruise playing Sergeant Nick Morton of the U.S. Army. His antics led to the
discovery of the tomb of Princess Ahmanet, a mummified princess whose crime was
joining forces with the dark power of Set and murdering her family to take the
throne.
Nick wasn’t an all-around good guy—he was a thief who used his military deployment to steal relics and sell them on the black market. The plot starts to unravel from here, revealing boring directing choices and a weak storyline.
The movie was
set in present-day London, which makes you wonder: why not just set it in the
old days of horses and swords like the Fraser movies? That was cool. But
Universal wanted to waste finances showing us a pointless plane scene, bus
scenes, underground tunnel scenes, and way too many guns and explosions.
My God, the
movie was just too much happening at once. Ahmanet is resurrected and wants to
kill Nick because he’s been chosen as the vessel to bring back Set (the
Egyptian god of the desert). This was part of a ritual Ahmanet was performing
before she was captured and mummified. Now, there’s also a secret society—this
society is the thin thread Universal is using to tie all their Dark Universe
movies together. The society is led by Dr. Henry Jekyll (yes, that Jekyll
and Hyde). We get to see him transform in this movie, which was another
distraction in an already scattered film, as we watch Mr. Edward Hyde battle it
out with Nick at some point.
Please note, the
outcome of this fight had nothing to do with the current movie. Universal just
needed to lay down some groundwork for future films—groundwork that could’ve
been done in a movie of its own. It’s in that movie where Tom Cruise
should’ve had a cameo. That’s how you link stuff and create a universe, not
like this.
In the end,
thanks to the huge marketing costs Universal pumped into this, combined with
the bad plot, not-so-great acting (all Cruise had to do was run around), and
the overuse of CGI, the movie ended up being a commercial loss. This made
Universal pull back on their Dark Universe plans. Even though there will be
a Bride of Frankenstein much later, I hope Universal will be wiser
this time.
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