Halloween Dark Universe Watch: The Mummy (2017) - the one with Tom Cruise

Watched:  10/02/2024

Format:  Peacock

Viewing:  First

Director:  Alex Kurtzman

She had style!

She had flair!

She was there!

That's how she became... the Mummy!

This is an amazingly wrong-headed and bad movie.  I really don't want to write it up, because it's going to take forever.  It's problems are legion, and it's astounding to think Universal went so hard at the "Dark Universe" concept and then this was their maiden flight.  A maiden flight which took off, did a loop-de-loop before crashing back into the airport, and which immediately killed the entire concept.  Thank God.

If you need a refresher:  in the wake of the success of Marvel's Avengers movies making a billion dollars each, Universal looked to see what IP they had laying around to exploit.  And, since the silent era, Universal has had classic horror in their stable.  Dracula, Frankenstein, Bride of, Wolfman, The Mummy, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Invisible Man... all Universal. What Universal decided to do was create a world in which these creatures co-exist and... fight crime?  I don't know.  And this movie didn't say, despite the fact all they do is stand around and explain things to the detriment of plot, character, and enjoyment of the very thing you're watching. 

There was plenty of precedent.  By the 1940's, the sequels had been bubbling up, and we did see Wolfman meet Frankenstein, and all of the monsters show up in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (which was, obvs, a horror-comedy, but featured the characters as audiences knew them in the straight movies).

Around 2015-16,Universal signed with major stars and were going to do this.  Tom Cruise!  Johnny Depp! Angelina Jolie! Russell Crowe!  Utterly missing the fact the stars of the originals were barely the actors - it was the concept.  They did so, so much press about this, and everyone kind of said "...why would you do this press?  Just make the movies."  But, nope, so high on their own supply, they ran into the streets to tell people about it, and then it blew up in their faces immediately, like Wile E. Coyote with dynamite.

The Mummy (2017) is the Tom Cruise-starring action-monster-not-horror vehicle that took the name and a few concepts from the original The Mummy movie and the subsequent Universal sequels, and turns it into a very expensive actioner devoid of plot, characters, charisma or joy.  Or fear.  It's a painful slog through scenes shot without enough light to ever see anything (Dark Universe!  HA!), wherein you can feel Cruise's people touching up a script that's already overstuffed, but with dollar-store baloney.

Our man Tom Cruise is both miscast as a scoundrel who is a known antiquities thief in Iraq (and still in the US Army?) and underwritten.  In fact, the entire movie - and I don't blame them exactly - feels like they hope 13 year olds will like all of this.  But the entire movie is "tell, don't show", and we keep being *told* Cruise is this slick thief, but... good luck seeing it.  Instead we get him running away in a gun battle because he failed.  It's supposed to be funny, but it... isn't.  One wonders what would have happened if they cast Jake Johnson in the lead role. 

Jake Johnson plays Griffin Dunne from An American Werewolf in London, by the way.  I cannot believe the balls on this movie just wholesale stealing that idea - and then doing fuck all with it.  Which, speaking of, somehow Tom Cruise dies during a plane-crash but comes back to life in a sealed body bag, and no one brings it up again.  This is what happens when we think of an idea for a trailer but we don't think of why the scene actually exists.

Essentially, the first 26 minutes of the movie is just a PowerPoint of Things To Know. England.  Egypt.  Mesopotamia.  Army.  Schemes.  Knights. Egyptian death gods. Someone needed to tell them "this is too much and not enough".  But none of it makes any sense on a basic plot level.  Why didn't the knights just toss the stone into the ocean 1000 years ago if it's something that will doom humanity?  Why didn't the Egyptians burn our mummy alive 3000 years ago?  Why why why?  It was like they had an idea board, and instead of make one thing work, they said "do all of it! How can we fail?"

It's not shocking to know director/ producer Alex Kurtzman is one of the guys who went on to be behind the messy, messy world of current Star Trek, and there's a direct line from how bananas this movie feels to Discovery rebooting itself every four episodes.  It's like he kinda basically understands there were popular original editions, and has no idea how to recreate any of that, just throwing shit at the screen hoping an idea here or there will stick.

One major hurdle for the movie is that what everyone thinks the story of Dracula is - because everyone has seen the Coppola Dracula at least once, is that it is *not* the story of Dracula.  That's The Mummy from 1932.  Dracula is more about fear of foreigners and the plague.  Subsequent Mummy movies would be more what you think of with an unkillable dude in bandages wandering around, but the OG Mummy is Boris Karloff using magic to try to convince Zita Johann she's his girlfriend from 3000 years prior, and bumping people off who give him guff about dating Johann.  You see shades of this in the 1990's Mummy movie, but only in the 3rd act, really.

Because Coppola fucked up what the world thinks Dracula is forever by making his Dracula the Mummy, this movie can't do that, and cleverly flips the gender of the mummy to a Pharoah's daughter and makes Cruise both the lead hero male and the Zita Johann character  - the object of the Mummy's obsession.  It's not some "across the sands of time our love will endure" thing, it's more by accident than some eternal draw.*  And that change up is one of the best ideas in the movie.  Our undead ladyfriend basically just tagged Cruise as the body where she's going to put an Egyptian deity.  It could have been Jake Johnson.

That's plenty of movie right there, but somehow this movie just keeps explaining itself over and over, and inserting SHIELD For Monsters into the plot, including Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll.  Because it totally makes sense that your orgs' leader is a maniacal drug addict with a split personality.

And, of course, it's one of those movies where you keep the doomsday weapon right next to the only being who wants it - but just a little out of reach. Instead of, I dunno, putting it in an industrial press.  But like everything else in the movie, the scene is very expensive and very stupid and nothing works if you spend half a second thinking about it, and I don't know how this happened.  (Also, she *kisses* people to steal their essence/ soul, and I kept thinking - well, now you're making it a weirdly and unnecessarily heteronormative movie.  And, sure enough, when given the chance, she just drowns blondie instead of stealing her soul).

Tom Cruise is, of course, old enough to be the father of either of the two women vying for his attention - the stunning blonde archaeologist whose character is "woman" (the stunning Annabelle Wallis), or the Mummy, whose character is "vaguely goth" (the equally stunning Sofia Boutella).  

The original Mummy is a curious film - and I can see why Coppola's Dracula stole from it - because Karloff's Ardeth Bey, for all his murder, is a sympathetic fellow.  He just wants his love back.  He's just a soggy romantic at heart.**  And, similarly, at some point Jamie and I just started talking about how we were rooting for The Mummy in this movie.  Girlfriend was dealt a bad hand, was proactive in fixing it, and was punished for trying to empower herself.  She's been patient in waiting to reclaim what's hers, all of these people are ding-dongs who deserve what happens to them, and she has real follow-through on her plans. Why Tom Cruise is so against spending eternity with god-like powers with the promise of lots of sex with a goth pilates enthusiast is beyond me, and the movie never says why he isn't down to clown - other than that he prefers blondes, maybe?  

And this movie is, I swear, 52% exposition.  So maybe stop and explain why one would not go for all of these things.  Or how what happens at the end is any way different from what he's been avoiding this whole time.  Or was it a self-actualization moment of "I CHOOSE ME"?  I have no idea.

At the end of the day, we learned a weird and wrong lesson from the 1990's Mummy movies, and that was that the Universal Monsters are ripe for action-adventure.  That culminated in the absolute shit-show that was Van Helsing (which was also trying to launch a cinematic universe, natch).  The Universal movies are not action movies.  They're not even horror in the way we think of the tryhard jumpscare shit of today.  They're mostly about terrifying ideas.  Curses.  Mad science.  Dudes who are here to drink your blood.   Slick Egyptian dudes stealing your girl.

So stapling on Tom Cruise-approved action sequences is kind of... exhausting.  You just want the story to move along because we're not here for CGI, poorly edited fights with faceless ghouls. I do not want to sit through four scenes where dead bodies chase Tom around for ten minutes.  Or watch Tom Cruise swim through what HAS to be the toilet water of London with his mouth wide open.  (Also, why is a Mummy movie involving so much water?  Also, where is the light coming from?  Also, the scene of the Mummy swimming away with the blonde in her arms is the funniest thing I've seen in forever, like two awkward porpoises going at it.)

The Mummy's powers are ill-defined and, from what I saw, she already has more powers than Gozer, so what is she doing and why?  WHY WHY WHY?  

There is one good sequence in the movie, when Jake Johnson is possessed by The Mummy and everything that happens in the airplane.  It's... anxiety inducing, but not scary.  If the whole movie had been that...  maybe we had something.  I suspect that sequence is what got the movie made.

It also has one of the worst epilogues I've ever seen in my life.  Is Cruise Set-Man now?  Why are they on horses?  Why headed for the pyramids and dragging a huge sandstorm with them?  Why didn't they just put the Mummy-lady in an industrial press instead of keeping her around in a deeply toxic pool of sludge that will surely be forgotten about in about ten years?

Why they didn't just have the blonde and Russell Crowe show up at the end and explain who they were to Tom Cruise after a tight 85 minutes is absolutely beyond me.  Shoving the SHIELD-for-Monsters concept in so hard in the middle of the film was so misguided, narratively, it's painful to watch. But like DC's efforts to rush their shared universe with Batman v Superman, this also is too much and not enough and way too dark to actually see half of what is happening.  

Anyway - I'm just ranting now.  But this movie was not good.  I can't believe Universal thought this was a way to start a universe, but I also thought that about Man of Steel.  That executives watched this movie and said "yes, we've publicly put everything on the line with this concept.  By all means, release this." tells me that no one at Universal had any idea what they were doing.  Or why Marvel worked.  Or why the Universal Monsters are beloved fixtures.  or why Batman v Superman was largely mocked by critics and a fair amount of the public.  And yet, they get mansions and cocaine.  And Alex Kurtzman gets to keep making things.  

I guess it's all handed over to Blumhouse now, which seems to be for the best.  

I don't want to be an anti-Tom Cruise dork, because I'm not, exactly.  But this is why no one wanted him to do a Marvel movie.  We all knew he'd come in and make it a Tom Cruise movie, and what that meant. He's great in his own sandbox, but...  I don't need him doing his schtick as Tony Stark, and that almost happened twice.

*which these days is more the obsession of 40-something dudes who miss the 1980's

**I also rec the Hammer horror Mummy movie with Chris Lee and Peter Cushing.  It's great stuff and plays well with these ideas