Alex Kurtzman
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Filmography
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An American Werewolf in London (1981)
Directed by John Landis
influenced The Mummy (2017)
Characters Plot Themes
If you’re opting for a light-hearted “Dark Universe,” be funny (Johnson’s sidekick reminds of An American Werewolf In London ).
One recurring story conceit, involving a smirking corpse guiding Nick around London, is borrowed from An American Werewolf In London .
It’s even worse when Kurtzman tries to meld those two modes into one, this tonally scattershot movie paying a half-assed homage to “An American Werewolf in London” before abandoning the idea in favor of generic genre sludge.
Then there's the shoehorned comedy, with Jake Johnson's specter aping Griffin Dunne's character from An American Werewolf in London .
Cruise plays Nick Morton, an antiquities thief, and Jake Johnson (“The New Girl”) plays his comic relief; the latter is a rehash of Griffin Dunne’s part in “An American Werewolf in London.”
(His ad-libbing sidekick is killed early, then reappears a la Griffin Dunne in “An American Werewolf in London.”)
What you may have noticed from the trailers alone and what becomes all too apparent in the feature is how closely The Mummy apes the Brendan Fraser film series.
Once the action shifts to an overcast London, The Mummy sporadically taps a vein of Gothic horror the last version of this property never approached; when Boutella’s vamping villainess first rises from the dead, creaking and croaking back to life, it’s in the boggy shadows of an overpass, infested with ravens.
The Mummy’s bandages unravel to reveal Sofia Boutella as the sinister Princess Ahmanet, Universal’s sexiest shrink-wrapped stalker to date (after Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee and Arnold Vosloo, so the competition is admittedly thin).
It’s in these scenes that The Mummy crackles with the kind of pulpy energy that elevated Stephen Sommers’ swashbuckling 1999 version; Johnson and Cruise have a fun rapport, and the film isn’t shy of poking holes in Cruise’s larger-than-life on-screen persona.
For now we’re cursed with “The Mummy,” a messy and muddled product lacking even the carefree spirit of the Brendan Fraser “Mummy” trilogy.
The scenery, captured by cinematographer Salvatore Totino (2012's " People Like Us "), is awesome, making pit-stops early on to the Namche Bazaar, Tengboche Monastery, and The Climbers' Memorial, dedicated to honoring the fallen climbers who have gone before.
Instead, we get Wahlberg and Ejiofor punching each other in a watered down version of the already dull plane fight from Tom Cruise’s “The Mummy,” by which point we’ve come to understand why the Nihilists are so extreme: “Infinite” only runs 106 minutes, but you’d do anything not to live through it again.
As a fan of the original Universal Monsters (I mean the ones from the 30s and 40s) as well as their flashier reboots throughout the 00s (well, The Mummy starring Brendan Frasier anyway, and I didn’t hate The Wolfman), I was really looking forward to The Mummy.
Think latter Underworld or Resident Evil entries (still better movies), and less Benicio Del Toro’s The Wolfman .
Over the last 15 years or so, McQuarrie has served as Tom Cruise’s amanuensis, earning screenplay credits by channeling the star’s persona into Valkyrie , Jack Reacher , Edge of Tomorrow , and The Mummy in addition to serving as the writer-director on the four final Mission: Impossible movies (the last two of which are to debut in 2023 and 2024).
His endless search for the perfect action vehicle has sometimes felt like a quest for some elusive fountain of Hollywood youth, and it’s led to gratifying highs (“Edge of Tomorrow”) and inexplicable lows (“The Mummy”).
Much of this I attribute to Cruise’s post-renaissance insistence for nearly all of his productions (save for The Mummy ) to feature boundary-pushing, fully practical, stunt-heavy filmmaking that keeps the magic of real, tangible filmmaking alive.
Mientras que el mainstream yanqui continúa empujando el negocio hacia las franquicias eternas, Cruise, una de las figuras con mayor poder intra Hollywood, pretende mantenerlo apegado a los preceptos que le interesan y le convienen a él, los de las estrellas inmaculadas del pasado, de allí surge el tono narrativo nostálgico de Top Gun: Maverick y el buen nivel de los trabajos de Cruise en formato productor/ curador artístico, pensemos en Barry Seal: Sólo en América ( American Made , 2017), de Doug Liman, Al Filo del Mañana ( Edge of Tomorrow , 2014), otra de Liman, la citada Oblivion , Jack Reacher (2012), de su compinche McQuarrie, y Operación Valquiria ( Valkyrie , 2008), del malogrado Bryan Singer, esquema que nos lleva a señalar que no todas son rosas porque el señor a veces entrega obras fallidas como La Momia ( The Mummy , 2017), de Alex Kurtzman, La Era del Rock ( Rock of Ages , 2012), de Adam Shankman, y Encuentro Explosivo ( Knight and Day , 2010), opus de James Mangold.