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Thursday, June 8, 2017

The Mummy



There's a lot going on in director Alex Kurtzman's reboot of The Mummy, but also not a lot going on. It's weird. Here we have a movie hoping to launch an entire shared universe that tries to be so many things and falls short of everything it could be. Sofia Boutella, the scene stealer from Kingsman: The Secret Service and Star Trek Beyond, is the new Mummy, an ancient Egyptian princess named Ahmanet. She was supposed to be Queen of Egypt, until her father the Pharaoh went and had a first-born son, putting the kibosh on her ascension. Ahmanet's response was to make a deal with Set, the Egyptian God of Death. Set turned her into a mummy a demon who murdered the Pharaoh and the rest of her family, but she was caught and mummified alive. That's how a princess who became a demon became The Mummy. 

Ahmanet was imprisoned far from Egypt, in a tomb deep beneath modern day Iraq. There she's inadvertently found by Tom Cruise, who plays a soldier of fortune named Nick Morton. However, this isn't the usual invincible Tom Cruise we normally see in Mission: Impossible films; this is more like the Tom Cruise from Edge of Tomorrow - an amoral jerk who gets his ass kicked a lot. I mean, a lot. Tom gets his ass handed to him by the Mummy and all her undead underlings throughout the movie. Cruise and a fetching archaeologist played by Annabelle Wallis survive a plane crash when they try to transport Ahmanet's unearthed sarcophagus, unwittingly unleashing the Mummy upon jolly old England. There's also the matter of the Mummy fixating on Cruise; she decided he's her chosen one whose mortal form will be inhabited by Set - all she needs is a dagger with a special ruby buried with a 12th century Crusader knight found in the bowels of London.

Doing his damnedest to make sense of all of this is Russell Crowe, who breathlessly narrates most of the movie's plot points and backstory. Crowe is the Head Explainer of a shadowy organization called Prodigium, which is headquartered beneath the British Museum of Natural History and tasks itself with "recognizing, examining, containing and destroying evil." Specifically evil in the form of gods and monsters, the more ancient the worse better. Crowe himself is one of those very monsters, as he portrays Dr. Henry Jekyll and his sadistic and cockney alter ego Mr. Edward Hyde. As the leader of Prodigium, Crowe's other duty is to set up the future of what's now branded as Dark Universe - Universal Pictures' shared universe of movie monsters. Prodigium's trophies include easter eggs of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, a vampire skull, and probably the Invisible Man (we don't see him in Prodigium, but isn't that the point?).

The Mummy is pure B-movie schlock. Like a real mummy, it's missing some blood and guts, and at 107 minutes, it zips along like it's got somewhere else to be. Ahmanet, emaciated after 5,000 years of mummification, spends much of the movie trying to get her hotness back (#MAHA - Make Ahmanet Hot Again) and become the queen she was supposed to be (#MAGA - Make Ahmanet Great Again.) Despite this, and a couple of perfunctory but neat looking moments like unleashing a patented Mummy sandstorm with a Mummy face right in the heart of London, Boutella's talents are oddly underutilized as The Mummy. Cruise and Wallis have some fun on the run throughout the movie, and Cruise amusingly gets tossed around by Ahmanet in every fight, until he decides to give in to his destiny and become a monster to save Wallis' life. Thus, Tom Cruise becomes not just a monster but, by virtue of becoming the host of Set, Tom Cruise becomes a god. One cool thing about being The Mummy and Set is that when their evil magic kicks in, Cruise and Boutella each have four eyeballs. Makes rolling their eyes at the silliness of The Mummy doubly effective.