The Mummy (2017)

Review: written Sep 2024

Dead on Arrival

I rewatched this movie recently, because part of me couldn’t quite believe it performed as badly as it did, and I thought perhaps with the talent involved it was due re-appraisal. Well, it turns out – it really is as bad as I faintly remembered.

Tom Cruise plays an American soldier in Iraq, who in the first few scenes we see intending to loot, choosing to kill Iraqis in order to gain profit, forcing his friend to do the same, sleeping with a woman in order to steal from her and lying to his superior. He isn’t a likable character, despite Cruise attempting to play him as a likable rogue. He finds himself being ordered to help archaeologist with an agenda Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis) to “recover” an Egyptian sarcophagus, which has been uncovered due to Cruise’s misadventures. The journey takes them to London, where we meet Henry Jekyll, portrayed as a kind of Monster Avengers-style leader. Russell Crowe adds nothing to a role seemingly designed to little more than spawn sequels and provide epic monologues of exposition as to what is going on. The movie starts with him explaining, he frequently stops to explain, and it even ends with him explaining. By the time we get to London it is clear, that all possibilities of exploring moral ambiguity in Cruises character (his thefts and lies are brushed off, and even kind of celebrated), or of exploring concepts of cultural appropriation, or even of gender clashes or indeed any other allegorical idea or nuance, are all ignored in favour of alternating between action scene and exposition scene.

In truth, some of the action scenes are pretty good – a chase in an ambulance from the undead, and a fight and escape from a crashing plane offer some adrenaline to keep you from falling asleep. But the attempts to weld together a franchise starter, a Mummy plotline, and a “lovable rogue” actioner with the horror genre it actually is spawned from, leave for a fractured and busy storyline that leaves no room for any substance.

If there is a plus side, it is the Mummy herself. Making the Mummy a female is an interesting spin, and Sofia Boutella brings a menacing grace that demands attention when she is on screen. It’s a shame that even her character full of possibilities is simply there to have “something evil” to fight against, and is used in a frankly occasionally troubling manner – she is held in a stress position having mercury injected and screaming in pain, while our “heroes” have a conversation in the foreground. Even her denouement smacks of male violence and power of man over woman which even if unintended should have never made it into the script.

It’s impossible to review then, without remembering that this was Intended as the start of a new universe of movies featuring Universal’s range of monsters (The Dark Universe). It’s partly this reason, and partly the actors who seem to all think they’re in a different movie, their performances all tugging against each other rather than providing any enjoyable chemistry to watch, that make this movie sink under its own pretensions. What a mess.