Green Goblin Reviews: The Mummy
Hey there, movie-going public!! Do you want to see Tom Cruise in a lead role where he acts like a prick, gets the ever-loving snot kicked out of him for the entirety of the film, fights to a bunch of enemies that are hard to distinguish and eventually culminates in front of a pyramid? Well then, I recommend you find a copy of Edge of Tomorrow and enjoy yourself. For those of you who want all of that but also crave to be bored, confused and left with a desire to remember Brendan Fraser fondly, then there’s 2017’s the Mummy: a reboot no one asked for, to kick off a cinematic universe no one wanted. It’s been a while since I’ve been so completely uninterested in a film, it’s actually sort of incredible that they fumbled this so badly. Granted, it’s not like this wasn’t clear from the trailers. But I could have always left the theater pleasantly surprised like I did with the Ghostbusters reboot. Sadly, I was not pleasantly surprised. So let’s dive in, shall we?
Tom Cruise plays Nick Morton; a military man who’s made a cozy side business out of looting the middle east, alongside his friend and partner in crime Chris (Jake Johnson). We’re told (after the fact) that he had slept with an archeologist and stolen her map to an ancient treasure and rather than doing their military duty, they decide to pursue this treasure map to its end. After the endeavor goes awry (in that they call in an airstrike 100 miles away from where they’re actually suppose to be stationed), they inadvertently open a tomb to an Egyptian princess. Nearly as soon as it’s unearthed, the two are then greeted by their CO, as well as the archeologist from the previous night, Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis). Rather than immediately detaining the two men for their clearly avaricious motives, the CO orders the men into the tomb to help Halsey with her research (because if there’s one thing you can clearly trust these two with, it’s to not go looting in a tomb, am I right?). The tomb is that of the Egyptian princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), who made a deal with Set (the Egyptian god of death in the film, but a god of chaos and violence in actual Egyptian mythos) to secure power by murdering her father and infant brother to ensure her inheritance of the throne. She was captured and mummified alive before her ceremony was complete, buried 1000 miles away from Egypt in a pool of mercury to ward off demons (seriously) and was erased from all Egyptian history. Nick is able to lift the sarcophagus using counterweights and as soon as he does, not only is he marked by Ahmanet as her beloved and liberator, but also as the physical vessel for Set in the 21st century. Soon enough, the (very loosely defined) powers of Ahmanet cause our characters’ plane to crash and all but one person (Halsey) dies. Nick later wakes up in the morgue, unable to die or sustain injury as Ahmanet still needs him to finish the ritual. Now it’s a race to discover how to break the curse and put Ahmanet to rest for good.
First off, The main characters are just…..terrible. Nick Morton is an unlovable scumbag who gets multiple allies killed with his recklessness, with no defined character arc other than he may occasionally do things that AREN’T just dick-slappingly evil. Halsey is played off as a very incompetent human being, knowing very little about how not to die in what are clearly perilous situations. At one point, Ahmanet has been captured and is being systematically sedated and restrained to be dissected, and Halsey protests under the condition that she’s a living being (despite the fact that she’s killed at least a dozen people at this point and has made it abundantly clear that she also wants to kill her). This frustrating character is compounded by the fact that Halsey’s character is just not acted well. It was like watching a child actor give emotion, unsure of where to look or give subtlety in her facial expressions. It was noticeable and drew me out of multiple scenes. And then there’s Ahmanet. Credit where credit’s due, Boutella acts the role given to her fairly well and the idea of just making the mummy into a glorified zombie queen is something that hadn’t really been done before, strangely enough. In the 1999 film, Imhotep was an ancient sorceror who had all these elemental and plague-related powers. Even in the 1932 version, he had psychic powers and could look into the lives of people from afar, like he was Rita Repulsa or something. So the idea of bringing it back to the baseline of “I’m dead and I can control the dead” is a decent premise to work with. And they’re all doing that twitchy, regenerative body contortion as they move, like Silent Hill enemies. But it’s more than a little aggravating when you. Can’t. Fucking. See. Them. Every single undead creature on screen is always shot in very dark shadows, often with shaky-cam added in. The only time the screen ever stops this is when Boutella regains her facial features and looks like a sexy dead person. But it’s a sad state of affairs when you see more of the corpsifying powers and undead soldiers in the Brendan Fraser pulp adventure take on the franchise than you do in the “dark and gritty” horror/action hybrid they’re trying for here. The other thing is that setting it up to happen in modern day cripples the film, as the silliness of a mummy’s curse fits well for an early 20th century pulp adventure setting. Nowadays, it’s hard to shake of the modern age “that shouldn’t work at all” feeling throughout the whole film.
I have to stop and remind myself about the actual plot of this movie I saw and hour ago, and when I do, all it does is sorta make me upset by how little it makes sense or gives any kind of satisfaction. I haven’t even touched on the whole “Dark Universe” thing. About halfway through the film, we’re introduced to Russel Crowe’s character (who’s a bit of a spoiler), who created this SCP-style organization to capture and destroy evil otherworldly stuff. You can tell they’re going for kind of a Hellboy vibe to connect these films together (Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, Wolf Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon, etc.) but you couldn’t bother to care when the established characters thus far are unlikable, the spectacle is indiscernible and the ending just leaves you feeling confused. It might have been good to leave the audience still asking questions; that is to say, if the answer to all of them couldn’t also be answered with “I honestly don’t care”.
2.5/10
Don’t bother. And that’s not just to you folks at home. I’m also talking to Universal. Seriously. The whole “Dark Universe” thing? Don’t bother.