*Fox too, since they refuse to let those X-Men rights lapse despite have no clear plan for where to go with them.
The Mummy is the first film in and a less than encouraging start to the Dark Universe. The movie begins with Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) and his put-upon partner, Chris Vail (Jake Johnson) in the Mesopotamian desert looking for priceless artifacts to loot. They are officers with the US Army but mostly play by their own rules. Nick is roguish and charming. Chris is nervous and exhausted by Nick's antics. Classic adventure movie duo. Despite being in Iraq, they stumble onto an ancient Egyptian tomb*. Then attractive female scientist, Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), who Nick of course had a fling with before the movie begins, shows up to investigate and explain what they find in the tomb. As you can imagine, they end up unleashing a mummy intent on destroying the world. Along the way, they meet up with a man (Russel Crowe) who leads a group investigating creatures like mummies and vampires - kind of a SHIELD for monsters. Nick also has a curse that ties him to the mummy for some reason. And, that's about it.
*For non-map whizzes out there, even though both are Middle-East-ish, that's a long distance away.
A Quick Warning: Before I get any further, I want to make a note of something. When I saw this movie, I was very tired and just about anything would've made me nod off a little. There's a chance that some of my appreciation of the film was impacted by this.
There's a few ways for a movie like this to work well. It could populate the world with interesting characters and a charismatic lead. It could create a memorable villain who threatens to take over the whole movie. It could string together a story that surprises you with each new development. Or, it could produce exciting sequences that drive the movie. The best movies do several or all of these things. The Mummy doesn't do any of these things.
The characters are duds. Tom Cruise takes all his movie star charm he's picked up from films like Mission Impossible and Knight & Day and uses it to animate a character that doesn't otherwise exist. His character is a generic Indiana Jones. By the end of the movie, I didn't know him any better than I did in his first minute. Wallis' character is a non-factor on her own and she also has little chemistry with Cruise. Johnson is there for comedic effect that never materializes. When looking back, his entire character feels like it was written in on the margins of the final draft of the screenplay right before shooting started. He exists to explain things that we could've intuited on our own. Crowe is pure exposition. Virtually every scene with him should've included a title card at the bottom of the screen reading "Look for the sequel in Summer 2019". And let me be clear, I like many of these actors in many other roles. They try to save these characters as much as they can, but there's not enough there to begin with.
The mummy was a bore. I haven't seen Sofia Boutella in much, just Kingsman and Star Trek Beyond. She's an OK actress, but if you cast her, it's because you want a character with some physicality. The woman can do some acrobatic moves. Mostly, Boutella is used in The Mummy to walk around menacingly or jump around in the shadows. The CGI effects do most of the work for her.
The story is too complex too be effective. It takes a little too much structurally from a Robert Langdon novel by tying everything to Crusade knights, missing jewels, and undiscovered tombs. I feel like a lot of this was done to move the action from Egypt to London so they could introduce the tie-ins to later Dark Universe installments.
As for the action sequences, they were uninspired. If you told me they were all designed so that Tom Cruise could do as many as possible, I'd believe that. There's one in which a plane is crashing and rolls Cruise around like he's in a giant clothes dryer. Another one is the classic "run out of a building as things keep exploding a half a pace behind you". It was all very manufactured. The horror side of things weren't much better, relying on a bunch of jump scares and weird body contortions.
One last thing, and this could be more about the specific audience for my showing than in general. The jokes bombed. Jake Johnson's character is there entirely to add some laughs and Tom Cruise is usually good for a couple as well. Not this time. Whenever the movie hit a beat that I could tell was supposed to get a laugh, there was silence. It was bizarre. Normally there's a least some polite laughter or people laughing because they are conditioned to. There's was almost none of that [that I could hear]. There is a reason for that. The jokes weren't very good. It's not like people were passing up killer material. I don't remember the last time they were this rejected by an audience.
The Mummy is by no means unwatchable. It's more like the inverse of Wonder Woman last week. Wonder Woman is a movie that does no one thing exceptionally. It just does everything well which elevates the film overall. The Mummy doesn't do anything unforgivably poorly. It does a lot of things not very well, which drags it down overall. This is looking more like another Sahara or Golden Compass*, than an Iron Man. If nothing else, this isn't an encouraging start for the Dark Universe.
*Sahara was a Matthew McConaughey bomb that was one of the most expensive movies ever made at the time . It only made back about half of its massive budget in the US and made even less internationally. It was intended to launch a series of adventure films and be the next Indiana Jones. No sequel was ever made. The Golden Compass is the is the 2007 film, intended to be New Line's next The Lord of the Rings, that was so expensive and did so underwhelmingly in the US that it crippled the studio beyond repair. Three month after its release, New Line stopped distributing films independently.
Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend
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