The Mummy (2017)

From everything I had heard about this film I knew that it was going to be bad, I was just really curious how bad. The Mummy is nothing I could call a good movie, but I was disappointed, I was honestly hoping it would be worse. Now the film is a mess, a lazy jumble of clichés that feels stitched together. Tropes abound, and no acting, writing, or directing muscles were strained, even the special effects felt a little nah. The apparent lack of effort is a little surprising given that The Mummy is intended to be the launching vehicle for a new cinematic universe, modeled after those of Marvel and DC, and built on reimaginings of the classic Universal Studio's monster properties of the 1930's and 40's.

Tom Cruise is Nick Morton, your typical movie rouge, a military reconnaissance officer with a side venture in antiquities dealing. Jack Johnson is Nick's best friend and co-conspirator Corporal Chris Vail, a model of a second banana who lays on the 'that's another fine mess you've gotten us into' shtick pretty heavy. Annabelle Wallis is the impossibly attractive British scientist and forced love interest for Cruise, who gets our chief protagonist in touch with Russell Crowe's Dr. Henry Jekyll. Obviously intended as a bridge character for later films in an expanding universe, the good doctor Jekyll presides over a S.H.E.I.L.D. like monster policing agency called the Prodigium, which he runs out of the British Museum in London while periodically injecting himself with a drug to keep his Mr. Hyde persona at bay.

There is a gender reverse on the dynamic of the Mummy trying to bring back to life its former lover, with female mummy Sofia Boutella trying to incarnate an evil Egyptian god into Cruise, after he accidently resurrects her upon digging her up in the Iraqi desert. The Iraq connection is another deviation from norm in that Boutella's Princess Ahmanet was apparently so evil that the ancient Egyptians opted to entomb her far from home base. So while other Mummy movies may have featured Isis, this is undoubtedly the first such film to feature ISIS. The film runs around stringing its set pieces together with segments of exposition, and none of the characters feel more then surfacey. I honestly wish the film could have been more batshit insane, instead its pedestrian and predictable, not quite a full slog but still tedious to sit through. In addition to various 'Dark Universe' spinoffs the movie sets up for a more or less direct sequel, which at first I thought we'd probably not get given how mediocre at best this movie is, but it's already made nearly $350 million, so... money talks.

Now it's not often that ones gets to say this, but this was well beneath the standard of quality I've come to expect from Tom Cruise. Universal owes him big for this one because without his star power this movie would have been a tremendous box office bomb, but instead its just a critical one. * 1/2