The Mummy made Tom Cruise running boring. How is that even possible?
This movie is so relentless and exhausting, and lacking in genuine intrigue, that by its end we struggled to find joy even in Tom’s legendary gait.
It begins with a good idea: establishing a cast of morally-suspect characters rather than infallible heroes. Cruise plays Nick Morton, a roguish US soldier who stumbles across the mummy’s cursed grave by accident. There’s also Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), and Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe), the man in charge of a mysterious organisation tasked with monitoring the world’s monsters.
And that’s before we even get to the monster herself, Princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), and her agenda to bring about the end of the world. There’s a lot going on – too much. As a consequence, we come to know most of them only superficially.
The obvious pressure to lay the foundations of a wider universe has an immediate impact on this movie. I never came to think of Cruise’s character as anything more than a lying cheat who would occasionally do the right thing. Cruise is perfectly fine in an unchallenging role, but there isn’t enough time to make Nick into even a generic loveable rogue.
Additionally, reimagining Dr. Jekyll as a monster hunter has obvious potential, but like so many of the neat ideas stashed away in The Mummy, there’s never enough time to explore.
The mummy herself suffers even more, despite a strong introduction. When she first emerges from her sarcophagus she’s surprisingly disgusting and moves with a creepy, joint-snapping rhythm that is distinct from anything I’ve seen in another zombie movie. She’s a formidable presence when creating chaos and reawakening the dead, but her final form lacks the visual flair that was always a hallmark of Universal’s classic monsters.
But there’s a deeper discrepancy. Unlike the very best Universal monsters, you’re never given cause to feel an ounce of sympathy for her plight. She isn’t a tragic romantic like Boris Karloff’s Imhotep; she was a bad person in life and now is resurrected to do very bad things for no specific reason. It’s hard to see her as anything but a rather traditional and one-dimensional villain. Ultimately she feels more like a prop than a conflicted, complex character.
The Mummy’s lack of characterisation isn’t helped by its deafening set-piece action. From the moment we meet Cruise’s character the movie accelerates towards a breakneck pace from which it rarely escapes. There’s a middle section where he’s endlessly falling into and out of vehicles, fighting hordes of zombies, and generally running in lots of directions.
You learn almost nothing about these characters during these lengthy sections, apart from that they appear to be in good shape. The action isn’t bad, but for the most part offers nothing witty or original, and by the end it simply becomes fatiguing.
SO WAS IT ALL BAD?
No. There are moments to enjoy, and almost all of them involve The Mummy embracing its horror roots and finding a way to meld that imagery and atmosphere with its action. There’s a great fight that takes place in a ruined gothic abbey in the English countryside. The moon is out and the crumbling church is shrouded in fog – it almost feels like you’ve wandered onto the set of one of the classic monster movies that inspired this one. But these assured elements of horror are unfortunately overwhelmed by the louder moments. I wish it had been the other way around.
The Verdict?
The Mummy isn’t completely rotten, but given its heritage and larger ambition it feels frustratingly generic and unfulfilling. There are moments where it reaches out for horror and produces something interesting and distinct from Hollywood’s other blockbusters, but those moments are buried beneath unremarkable and, by the end, tedious action sequences. As the first chapter in the coming Dark Universe films, The Mummy contains glimpses of promise and potential, but it’s far from the most solid foundation.
Find the Skid Reviewer at:
www.youtube.com/theskidreviewer www.facebook.com/theskidreviewer Instagram at the_skid_reviewer
(The Skid Reviewer is a YouTube channel run by two comic book fans from Nagaland, who make videos about anything that catches their fancy)
