The Mummy (2017)

The Mummy (2017)

5/10

Starring

Tom Cruise

Annabelle Wallis

Sofia Boutella

Jake Johnson

Directed by Alex Kurtzman

This movie deserved the Razzie nominations it got.

I felt like I was watching Mission Impossible with a mix of some Indiana Jones. Let us be honest there is little to expect in a mummy movie. You will expect a raggedy old mummy, some mystic powers and a deep thriller. Now all that we can get with ease 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 movies) that starred Rachael 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 that we do not forget Imhotep that easily.

This new Mummy movie just washes away very quickly. Universal studios ended up being what D.C. is, struggling to make a Universe that can be a rival to Marvel. Instead of learning from Marvel, they tried to do it the D.C. way, connect all the dots in one movie.

It did not work for D.C. and it did not work for Universal here also. In this movie we are meant to be introduced into the Dark Universe, where the creatures of Universal studios live. Our lead in this movie, the man that will start things up is Tom Cruise playing Sergeant Nick Morton of the U.S. Army. His antics led to the discovery of a tomb of the mummified Princess Ahmanet whose crime was that she joined forces with the dark power of Set and murdered her family to take the throne.

Nick was not an all around good guy he was a thief who uses his military deployment to steal relics and sell in the black market. The plot starts to unravel to reveal boring directing path and a weak plot from here down.

The movie was set in London in present day which now makes you wonder, why not just set the movie in the old days of horses and swords like the Fraser movies, that was cool. But Universal wanted to waste finances showing us a wasteful plane scene, bus scenes, underground tunnel scene and the movie had too many guns and explosions.

My God the movie was just too much happening at once, Ahmanet is resurrected and wants to kill Nick as he has been chosen as the vessel to bring back Set (Egyptian God of the desert). A ritual Ahmanet was performing before she was captured and mummified. Now there is a secret society, this society is the thin thread that Universal is going to tie all their Dark Universe movies, the society is led by Dr. Henry Jekyll (you know, Jekyll and Hyde). We get to see him turn in this movie, which was another distraction from an already distracted movie, as we get to 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 present movie, but Universal needed to lay down some ground work for future movies, ground work that could have been done in a movie of its own. It will now be in that movie that Tom Cruise will have a cameo, that is how you link stuff and create a Universe, not like this.

In the end, thanks to the huge marketing cost that Universal pumped into this, then the bad plot, not so good acting cause all Cruise had to do was run around – add to that the huge CGI effects, the movie ended up being a commercial loss. This made Universal pull back on the reigns of their Dark Universe and even though there will be a Bride of Frankenstein much later, I hope Universal will be wiser this time.