Okay, let’s not kid ourselves here. The Mummy, from beginning to end, is the film that only well-ironed suited executives can make. Not a director. Or for that matter, even a trademark narcissist like Tom Cruise.
Supposedly the first salvo from Universal Studios, The Mummy is the first of the series that plans to unleash monsters of yore one after another. While rival studios are busy milking Marvel and DC cosmos as their cash cows, Universal has gone scurrying back into their past, looking for that one big idea. Thus spoke the suits – let’s create ‘Dark Universe’ and release gods and monsters on unsuspecting audiences.
So you get a poor man’s Indiana Jones named Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) running around in Iraq looking for ancient artifacts.
Boom! He unearths the mummy, aka Princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) who slaughtered her family millennials ago for the love of throne but got mummified before she could summon Set, the god of death.
Poor woman. Now she is awake, she is angry, and she is hungry. So what does she do? She kisses people. Yes, the evil can gain life force with a kiss of death.
The film has half a dozen screenwriters to its credit, but they also appear as Ahmanet’s army as zombies. The narrative is also an exercise in boldness, of lifting scenes that are well etched in memory, from An American Werewolf in London, Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan to half a dozen zombie movies.
Since it’s a Universal universe, Russell Crowe also gets thrown in inanely as Dr. Henry Jekyll. Yes, that infamous two-in-one guy.
The original film starring Boris Karloff was never considered a masterpiece, but it had eerie ideas of its own. The last reboot of the franchise featuring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz took upon the themes of horror, and added whacky fun. Clearly, no one expected a masterpiece here. Still zero fun, zero horror.
With Cruise at the helm, the film serves only his facial tantrums. He runs, jumps, gets thrown in, thrown out, drowned in, pushed up, stabbed yada yada yada.
It’s another of his template run, doing the same things he’s been doing for the past decade, but here, he gets the clumsiest of dialogues to utter, making you want to scream, “SHUT UP!”
So what remains? Even Cruise’s emptiest of films in recent times were saved by nifty action scenes, but The Mummy has none. The only one that offers him some probable is the plane crash sequence, which gets cut midway because we’re supposed to admire how good the 50 plus star looks in his naked skin.
Ideally, one must take note of the deep-seated sexism of the film. If Annabelle Wallis’s hack of an archeologist Jenny Halsey needs rescuing repeatedly, Princess Ahmanet gets the misfortune of being portrayed as irredeemably black. But Cruise’s cursed character gets the dilemma within to pursue.
Add to that, American studios can casually bomb a village in third world just to take the plot forward. But by the time you’re watching Cruise galloping into the sunset to peddle upcoming sequels, you’ll be too exhausted to bother about the moral misadventures of this venture.
Consider it dead on arrival. No, undead.
(The writer is a journalist and a screenwriter who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise; he tweets @RanjibMazumder)
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