The Mummy (2017)
Directed by Alex Kurtzman
Though safely entombed in a crypt deep beneath the unforgiving desert, an ancient queen whose destiny was unjustly taken from her is awakened in our current day, bringing with her malevolence grown over millennia, and terrors that defy human comprehension.
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3 films that influenced The Mummy
What critics say influenced The Mummy
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.
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 .