The Mummy is fucking awful and it pisses me off on several levels. This is the worst kind of cynical, corporate horseshit. I love the old Universal monster movies. Mummies are my favorite variety of classic monsters. Yummy Mummy was even my favorite of the monster cereals. But I can’t for the life of me understand why the executives at Universal are convinced that The Mummy should be a big-budget summer action adventure. I don’t get it. It is supposed to be a horror film. That would be like a future generation reimagining Friday the 13th as a sci-fi romance. Additionally, this isn’t so much a movie as a two-hour trailer for future movies. The idea of the “universe” has so engulfed Hollywood that they no longer care about making a quality initial film, let alone care about the genre it is in.
So Tom Cruise and his friend Chris are scavengers or something looking for something valuable in the Middle East when they stumble upon the tomb of the mummy. And there is a doctor named Jenny that feels it’s a great historic find and she works for a top-secret agency run by Dr. Jekyll (yes, that Dr. Jekyll, played by Russell Crowe) that is searching the world for monsters for some reason. And Tom Cruise’s friend dies early on but keeps reappearing as a ghost zombie to give him advice, which will sound mighty familiar to anyone that has ever seen An American Werewolf in London. And they all need a knife with an amulet for some reason. I don’t know. Not going to lie, I spaced out quite a bit during this from a mixture of boredom and blinding rage.
Nothing about this works. Tom Cruise is essentially playing his character from Mission: Impossible and this could have easily been a supernatural entry in that series, except shittier. The action scenes don’t amount to enough to make it a viable action movie like the M:I movies. But it’s supposed to be a horror movie, you say? Fuck no, it isn’t. There is not one legitimate bit of tension in this thing. The problem with having Tom Cruise being chased by monsters is that you know that he will be fine because he is Tom fucking Cruise. The special effects are awful. Is cinema really at the point where basic makeup effects have to be done with shitty CGI effects? This thing cost hundreds of millions of dollars and they could have created better effects spending $20 at the local party store. The Mummy? Fuck the mummy. She looks nothing like a mummy. Not a scary one, anyway. She looks like a hot chick wearing a mummy outfit for Halloween but she didn’t want to cover her face because, you know, she’s hot. This is PG-13, so there is no gore. There are no stakes. There is not a single reason to give a fuck throughout this entire piece of shit.
I like the Marvel movies. I really do. Some are great, some are good, but none are really bad. But their influence on modern filmmaking needs to be killed with fire. This entire movie is a setup for future movies. The plan is to set-up more versions of Dracula, The Wolfman, Creature from the Black Lagoon, etc. The beginning of this movie even establishes a logo for this horseshit under the “Dark Universe” label. Maybe I am old-fashioned, but what fucking happened to just trying to make a good movie and letting the public decide what deserved to be a franchise? Did we really need Dr. Jekyll in a fucking Mummy movie showing up to play Nick Fury for monsters? This worked in the original Iron Man because it was a really good and self-contained film that just had a post-credit scene that lent itself to a broader future universe. This movie would be like if Samuel L. Jackson showed up every ten minutes in Iron Man to make reference to other heroes. It’s fucking insufferable and it simply assumes that it has deserved the admiration of the audience. It hasn’t.
Why is this a mummy movie? It is one of the most simple concepts out there, but they can’t get it right. This movie is going to lose a ton of money and hopefully spare me from future entries in this monster series, but it doesn’t need to be that way. If you want to make The Mummy, make it a low-budget, R-rated horror film and release it for Halloween. It will make a profit, I guarantee it. And bring back Yummy Mummy as a promotional tie-in. How goddamn hard is that?
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mummy_(2017_film)#/media/File:The_Mummy_(2017).jpg
