The Mummy (2017)

[The Great Owl]

My review from the Movies section of the forum is posted below. I'll probably buy the Blu-ray simply because I'm excited to see what the Dark Universe franchise can bring up in the future.


This 2017 version of The Mummy is the first entry in the Dark Universe franchise, which will update the iconic Universal Monsters films for our present age. These new movies will center around the laboratory of Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe), who runs a secret organization that captures, contains, or destroys monsters, supernatural threats, and evil entities around the world. In this first film, Tom Cruise plays Nick Morton, a soldier of fortune who inadvertently discovers the tomb of Ahmanet, a beautiful Egyptian princess who was entombed alive after selling her soul to a god of darkness and murdering her family. Princess Ahmanet, who is played by Sofia Boutella, is still an unpleasant sort when she awakens from her centuries of imprisonment after a chaotic series of events, and she wastes no time acting on her anger by raising the dead, unleashing horrible dust storms, and possessing the soul of Morton, who must protect his lovely romantic interest, played by Annabelle Wallis, from the mummy's wrath.

Sadly, this new film lacks the eerily restrained brilliance of the 1932 Universal version of The Mummy that starred Boris Karloff, it lacks the sinister visceral appeal of the 1959 Hammer Studios version that starred Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, and it even lacks the joyously slapstick adventure of the 1999 version that starred Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. What it does have, in excess, is a series of "Mummy Impossible" scenes with Tom Cruise surviving gunfights, plane crashes, car chases, and femme fatales (a mummified femme fatale, anyway). I have always been fascinated with the idea of mummy curses since I was a child, and this seems like a difficult concept to screw up in a film, but Universal Studios fails to draw us into the fold by way of any semblance of a suspense buildup, and, instead, they inundate us with a barrage of computer effects action sequences that merely had me looking at my watch and wondering where I would go for dinner after the movie was over.

This new reboot of The Mummy has the highest budget and the most elaborate visual effects of all of the mummy films in cinema history, but it is also the most boring one. I can't help thinking that there's a lesson here somewhere.

On the plus side, The Mummy is not a total loss, and it does have its enjoyable aspects. For starters, I think that Sofia Boutella's mummy is a lot easier on the eyes than Boris Karloff's mummy or Christopher Lee's mummy, so I simply enjoyed looking at her for the duration of the film. Tom Cruise is still a charismatic and fun actor to watch after all of these years, and he excels yet again in another one of his trademark roles as a cocky and careless character who gradually learns about responsibility and sacrifice over the course of the story. Most importantly, though, I now understand and appreciate where Universal Studios plans to take us for these Dark Universe stories, and I think that the final minutes of this film do a fantastic job of setting the tone for what is to come. My pulse quickened and my eyes lit up when Tom Cruise's Morton walked through Dr. Jekyll's laboratory, and the camera revealed a split-second shot of a glass-encased claw that resembled that of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The Dark Universe franchise will need to step up its game for any subsequent films, but I really hope that it has a chance to do so.