The Mummy (2017)
There's a special kind of disappointment that comes from watching a film that doesn't just fail, but fails while desperately trying to be five things at once. The Mummy (2017) is that film. A confused, joyless, soulless mess that takes one of cinema's most beloved adventure franchises and drains every last drop of fun out of it in pursuit of a shared universe that, mercifully, never came to be.
Tom Cruise plays Nick Morton, a roguish soldier of fortune who accidentally awakens an ancient Egyptian princess with godlike destructive power. On paper, that's a reasonable setup. In practice, it's the jumping-off point for one of the most tonally incoherent blockbusters in recent memory. The film can't decide what it wants to be. Is it a horror film? A superhero origin story? A spy thriller? A monster movie? It tries all of them and lands on none of them, lurching from sequence to sequence with the desperation of a studio executive frantically pitching in a boardroom.
Sofia Boutella, playing the titular Mummy, is genuinely striking and does her level best with what she's given. She's all presence and physicality. But the script underuses her at almost every turn, reducing what should be an iconic, terrifying antagonist to a plot device in service of mythology-building for films that would never get made. It's a waste, plain and simple.
Then there's Russell Crowe, appearing as Dr. Jekyll (and his rather less subtle other half), and I'm still not entirely sure whether he knew he was in a parody. The character exists purely to explain the film's lore to the audience in long, leaden scenes that feel lifted from a corporate franchise bible. Every moment he's on screen, the story grinds to a halt. Annabelle Wallis, meanwhile, spends most of her screen time either unconscious or screaming, which is a fairly grim state of affairs for a lead female character in 2017.
What made the 1999 Mummy work so brilliantly was its wit and warmth. It had charm by the bucketload. It understood that adventure and horror and romance could coexist if you trusted the audience and had a lightness of touch. This version takes that formula, strips out everything that made it loveable, and replaces it with grim, self-serious bombast. The visual effects budget is clearly enormous, and there are a handful of sequences that are technically impressive, but spectacle without soul is just noise.
The pacing is all over the place. The dialogue clunks. The plot, involving ancient curses, secret military organisations, and mythology that ties into a broader monster-verse, is convoluted in a way that feels designed by committee. You can practically see the flowchart of franchise decisions being worked through in real time. Every creative choice seems subordinate to the question: how do we set up the next film? The answer, as it turned out, was: badly.
Cruise himself feels oddly miscast. He's perfectly capable of carrying a big action film, and there's nothing wrong with his performance exactly, but his usual charisma seems switched to a lower setting here, as if he's aware the material isn't giving him anything to play with. Nick Morton has no real arc, no genuine stakes, and no discernible personality beyond "Tom Cruise running," which by itself is not enough to build a film on.
The Dark Universe was Universal's grand plan to do what Marvel had done with its superheroes, but with its classic monster properties. It was, by any measure, a spectacular miscalculation. And this was ground zero. A tombstone for a franchise before it even began.
There's no redemptive arc here, no guilty pleasure energy, no so-bad-it's-good quality to fall back on. It's just a lifeless, lurching corpse of a film that should've stayed buried in the sand.
One and a half stars.
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