The Mummy is an epic mess of a movie, but it was always going to be, considering all the ingredients which went into its making. There’s a male director (Alex Kurtzman) who has only made one movie before and is best known as one of the screenwriters behind some divisive and often outright terrible (as well as casually misognynistic) movies. There’s a motley crew of 6 credited screenwriters who range from longtime Hollywood hacks to credible writers who should have known better to newbies just happy to be there. There’s a horribly miscast leading man whose refusal to play to his actual age is bordering on sad at this point. There’s a supporting cast who have been given jack shit to do. And there’s a studio desperately trying to kickstart a cinematic universe, even if that means ruining their movie of the moment in the hopes of launching many more movies in the future. The result is an embarassing failure which doesn’t actually have a second act and never manages to settle on a tone, instead awkwardly alternating between Romancing the Stone adventure, Mission Impossible practical stunts, gothic horror, jump scares and sudden Iron Man 2 syndrome.
It’s disappointing because based on the first trailer The Mummy sure seemed to have everything you’d want/expect from a Tom Cruise blockbuster – a showcase practical stunt (this time an extended glimpse at the interior of a plane while it is in freefall and tossing its passengers around like ragdolls), strong female co-stars (Sofia Boutella, Annabelle Wallis) who’ll probably upstage him ala Edge of Tomorrow and Rogue Nation, a surprise cameo from someone you wouldn’t expect to see in this kind of movie (Russell Crowe here, Anthony Hopkins in MI:2) and, most importantly, shots of Cruise running in that way where his arms cut through the air like swords. Sure, there is no obvious Scientology metaphor messaging, and this is actually a newish genre for Cruise, who hasn’t done anything remotely horror-related since Interview with the Vampire. But this still looks like Mummy Impossible: Mummy Protocol.
It’s not, though. This isn’t the Tom Cruise movie you’re expecting. In fact, Mummy is so impossibly busy setting up its bullshit cinematic universe that Cruise doesn’t show up until we’ve had to sit through nearly 10 minutes of prologue which zigs from ancient Eypgt and narration explaining the titular mummy’s background as a renegade Queen before zagging to mysterious Russell Crowe and his soldiers taking over a seemingly unrelated archeological site in present day London. Only then do we finally get to Cruise and his co-stars in Iraq, watching as his Nathan Drake-like character happens upon an ancient tomb and accidentally unleashes a curse. Before long, though, we’re already flashing back to every part of the prologue because modern movies like The Mummy all assume the worst of their audience and bend over backwards to spell everything out. So, if you show up late to Mummy you don’t need to worry. Everything you missed will be re-explained again (and again) because you’re watching a movie which thinks you’re an idiot.
THE PLOT: Military people find some mummy-related artifact which causes a plane crash. One specific victim somehow returns from the dead, but he doesn’t fall in line with the mummy who is hellbent on destroying national landmarks and claiming him as her eternal mate. Plus, there’s a MacGuffin everyone wants because of there is.
If you ignore all of that and focus on everything with Cruise and pals there’s around 40 minutes of a kind of okay B-grade monster movie here. It’s hokey, poorly acted, and often mockable, but some of the jump scares actually work, Jake Johnson lands a decent joke or two as the comic relief sidekick and Kurtzman works in a couple of Evil Dead/Shaun of the Dead-esque bits involving comically relentless zombies. Wallis is an instant dud as the take-charge hot lady scientist with a past romance with Cruise, but the fault lies in the script, not in her performance (it’s certainly not her fault that Kurtzman’s camera needlessly leers at her exposed midriff at one point). Courtney B. Vance, as their boss, has the good sense to be killed off right away. Cruise does the modern day Tom Cruise thing – peforming impressive practical stunts while playing a despicable character placed on a redemptive arc – and Sofia Boutella is certainly watchable as the mummy.
But then the turn happens. We’re all familiar with this by now. It’s the shrug-inducing Iron Man 2/Batman v Superman turn when the plot of the actual movie you’re watching suddenly takes a back seat to the larger purpose of setting up a cinematic universe you may or may not care about. At least when Iron Man 2 sacrificed its entire second half to set up The Avengers we could take solace in the fact that we’d already had one full Iron Man movie and at least half of a good sequel. Not Mummy, though. Universal wants to spring Dracula, Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and countless other monster movies out of this, and the last time they played the “let’s make a complete monster movie first, and then worry about sequels and spin-offs” game they ended up with the Dracula Untold. Screw that noise. We want our cinematic universe and we want it now, or so the Universal execs likely argued.
So, The Mummy screeches to a halt to allow its own Coulson/Nick Fury-figure, Russell Crowe’s Dr. Jekyll, to more or less take the movie hostage, drop easter eggs (references to Dracula, Frankenstein and Creature from the Black Lagoon and others come flying at us) and set up all sorts of prequel and sequel possibilities, including perhaps an origin movie for himself. Because, spoiler-alert, Mr. Hyde does get to come out and play, acting as a mini-villain of sorts before he and Jekyll mercifully exit the movie. It’s actually quite hilarious. It almost literally goes like this:
Crowe: Hi, I’m Dr. Jekyll [pause for dramatic impact]
Cruise: Um, is that name supposed to mean something to me? Who the hell are you?
Crowe: Don’t worry, Tom. The audience gets it. Now, excuse me while I load this medical injection gun in front of you and inject myself with a special medicne to hold off my evil alter-ego. I can sense him coming any second now.
Cruise: Evil alter-ego? What? Should you really be waiting until the last second to do that?
Crowe: Probably not, but this way looks so much cooler.
[Cut to one scene later]
Crowe: Oh, rats. I already need another injection because someone somewhere thought it was a good idea to put a highly unstable person like me in charge of movie monster SHIELD. You know what? Let’s not get to the injection in time because, frankly, you don’t cast me to play a man with a short temper and not let me throw a phone at you. Plus, this way you can defeat me and get back to fighting the mummy we currently have chained up in that area where we do all of our evil experiments. See you in the sequel!
This section of the movie features Cruise at his most confused, but, really, he wears a look of near-constant befuddlement regardless of what’s happening. It’s supposed to reflect his character’s ongoing confusion over the quickly escalating set of events which have resulted in him somehow being chosen by an ancient mummy to be the vessel through which she will bring the Egyptian god of death into the world. In reality, though, it’s just as likely Cruise wasn’t so much acting as was simply trying to work through his own personal confusion as to how the hell he ended up in a Mummy movie directed by the guy who co-wrote the first two Transformers movies.
But maybe I’m projecting. Perhaps it’s foolish to assume Cruise would have enough self-awareness to realize what a poor choice this was. If he or anyone else responsible for making this movie was more self-aware they’d realize how impossibly silly it is to watch 55-year-old Cruise trying desperately to look like he’s 35 and romancing two female co-stars, Wallis and Boutella, who weren’t even alive when he made Risky Business. They woudn’t have forced one of those ladies to constantly tell Cruise’s character what a good person he is despite all evidence to the contrary. And they certainly wouldn’t have thought it was a good idea to build a plot that basically boils down to a female mummy just really wanting to bang Tom Cruise.
That last part actually bears repeating: the plot of this movie boils down to Sofia Boutella chasing after Tom Cruise so that she might mount him and have her way with him, in this case completing a ritual which will turn him into a god. It’s an ego stroke that Tom Cruise, a man in his fifties, felt like he needed, and it’s embarrassing to watch. Even without all of the Dark Universe crap in the second half The Mummy may never have been salvageable, not with that as its basic plot.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The Mummy is as wrong-headed as they come, perfect fodder for those who love to watch bad movies but entirely skippable for anyone not given to such schadenfreude.
We Minored in Film 
Yeah, I was NOT feeling that trailer. I was just “meh”.
And I try really hard NOT to believe in the existence of Iron Man 2, so thanx for the heads-up on that.
Iron Man 2. What movie’s that? I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about (as I try to help with you choosing to deny that movie’s existence).
Great review! When I saw the trailer, I turned to my husband and said, “Isn’t he too old for that?”
I’ve seen others say that it’s like they wrote a movie for one of the Chris’s (Pratt, Pine, Hemsworth, Evans) and then cast Tom Cruise instead. Frankly, Cruise isn’t even the most ideal actor in this movie to play that role. Jake Johnson would have been the better choice, and not just because the character just so happens to be named Nick (just like Jake’s New Girl character).
But Cruise’s refusal to act his age or act alongside any moderately age-appropriate woman is nothing new. According to THR:
If there’s a clear hint that Cruise’s agelessness may have an expiration date, it’s in considering his female co-stars in some of these recent films: Olga Kurylenko and Andrea Riseborough in Oblivion, Emily Blunt in Edge of Tomorrow, and now Annabelle Wallis and Boutella in The Mummy. The last time Cruise’s female co-star was less than 10 years younger than him was back in 2005, when Miranda Otto, 5 years his junior, played his ex-five wife in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. (It should be noted that Otto’s in only a few scenes, unlike Blunt, Wallis, Boutella, Kurylenko, Riseborough, or any of Cruise’s other female co-leads of recent memory.) Cruise is hardly the first male star to play opposite younger women, but the more he tries to stay the same age, the more obvious the age gap becomes and less believable the repartee, a major problem for The Mummy, which tries and fails to build up Wallis and Cruise as a screwball-comedy-style couple.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/mummy-time-tom-cruise-act-his-age-1012123?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=THR%20Live%20Feed%20Alerts_now_2017-06-10%2019:00:36_kstanhope&utm_term=hollywoodreporter_livefeed
Question KK. Would you have enjoyed the film if Cruise wasn’t cast in it? Curious to know. The Mummy to me is Boris Karloff and a lot of scares and deaths. This and the Brendon Fraiser franchise have gone for the jumanji type storyline.
I likely would have enjoyed it slightly more without Cruise, but there is a creepiness to the overall storyline (re: the mummy just really wants to bang the guy to bring forth her god) and supreme clunkiness to the Dark Universe-establishing second act which couldn’t have been improved by any leading man.
The moment I saw the trailer I knew it would be bad. The first tip off was Tom Cruise basically being his Mission Impossible self. The second was the dust face…hello, we already did see this in the last Mummy movie. And it’s sequel. Come up with something new!
And you know what was great about the last ones? As corny as they were, at least Brandon Fraser was just a foil. His character was never the actual main character of the movie, that way always the supposedly love interest. And now we get a movie which plays the old action movie tropes straight? Yeah, don’t think so.
Above all, I don’t think that universal understands what people actually liked about the original monster movies. Or that monsters aren’t freaking superheroes (unless they belong to the league of extraordinary gentlemen, naturally).
Yeah, the dust face actually happens two times in the movie, in quick succession, the first time being a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kind of deal.
I honestly can’t speak too much to the Fraser movies becaue it’s been so long since I’ve seen any of them, and I know I never saw the third one. However, I have a memory of those first two movies being fun, and Fraser coming off like a purposefully cartoon Indiana Jones. The new one, yeah, not so much.
It’s appropriate that you would mention The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen because that’s the feeling you get during The Mummy’s unfortunate second act when Russell Crowe pops by to provide his commercial for a future Dr. Jekyll movie. I was watching it and thinking, “Why didn’t they just remake LXG?” Because that’s what they’re trying to mimic just with far less of a coherent story structure and ultimate goal. Where could any of this possibly be leading to? Are they going to fight crime? Which villain will unite their cause? And what possibly cause could that be?
I actually think the franchise might have worked better with lesser known leads a bit like avengers did. Ok chris evans and rob downey jnr are household names now but back then they werent that well known. Downey jnr wss the biggest name and before iron man he just did small indie movies. Samuel L jackson is just a cameo so dkesnt count. The rest were smaller names. Tom cruise? Russel Crowe? Too big. Its practically winking at the audience and saying it doesnt matter if you like this or not because all these big stars want a steady pay check.
I’d say the casting of Cruise and Crowe is evidence that Universal didn’t believe in the core concept of the Dark Universe, i.e., that there really is a sizable audience out there who wants to see the Universal movie monsters rebooted into an Avengers-like universe. There are probably some, but not enough to justify the budgets. Universal already knows this first-hand from their failed Dracula Untold experiment, which starred not-quite-movie-star Luke Evans. So much of The Mummy, really, is a direct reaction to Dracula Untold. That was a monster movie starring a quasi-unknown and featured a tacked-on post-credits scene setting up a shared universe. It didn’t work. The Mummy is an action movie with occasional horror moments that sacrifices its entire second act to setting up a shared universe and stars two big movie stars, one of whom is arguably the biggest movie star in the world. That too isn’t working out the way they hoped because while this is so much easier said than done at the end of the day it comes down to remembering always to simply make good movies, and Universal failed by leaping before they could even walk (but the interntional market might save them).