The Mummy

Year: 2017
Genre: Action
Directed: Alex Kurtzman
Stars: Tom Cruise, Annabelle Wallis, Sofia Boutella, Russell Crowe, Jake Johnson, Courtney B. Vance, Marwan Kenzari, Simon Atherton, Stephen Thompson, James Arama, Matthew Wilkas
Production: Universal Studios

The Mummy often feels like a nightmare. Not an interesting or memorable nightmare mind you, but the kind where you wake up mind boggled by the various avenues your stream of consciousness went sloshing around. It's just a mess - a huge, blundering, skin-festering, cliche-riddled, desperate mess.

Well don't sugarcoat it...

The first sign of trouble occurs before the film even has a chance to introduce us to its characters. The Universal logo inverts its blue/green globe revealing an eclipsed Earth, with "Dark Universe" scrawled in big, bold, overly-confident gold letters. The hubris of a promised extended universe is then immediately undone by Tom Cruise's soldier of fortune, Nick Morton and his compromising exchange with franchise female dead-weight Annabelle Wallis. From there the movie sputters on the same broadly drawn characters and sweeping barrage of action set pieces that would have felt more at home in the 1999 Brendan Fraser movie. Yet while that movie played up its cliches for cheeky laughs and cheap scares, this one wants you to take in the first twenty minutes like you're sucking down prized Kentucky mash.

Please, put me in a better movie!

Once the smoke has cleared both figuratively and literally, the movie introduces us to its titular monster, a cursed, soul-sucking Egyptian princess played by a very game and oh so terribly utilized Sofia Boutella. As refreshing as it may seem to have a female mummy, Universal's only real ace in this faux franchise so far, having her play this specific monster with sexual moxie is like asking to make high cuisine out of coprophagia.

But before we even see her face and can recognize her physical presence, we're forced to experience a farcical amount of brittle zombie attacks and really cheap looking CGI which makes you wonder where the $125 million it took to make this movie went. It clearly didn't go to making this movie look good. Principal photography took place in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England but it might as well have been shot in a hollowed out missile silo for all the under-lit, flat-looking and dull frames that assemble this movie. I was seriously wondering if I was watching a big-budget spectacle or an Underworld (2003-Present) movie.

Ahahahahaha!!

What's left of this quivering mass of insipidness has its neck snapped by the halfway mark. The movie stops cold to fully explore the minutia of Prodigium: The Dark Universe's analog to S.H.I.E.L.D. Only instead of it being a welcome distraction (the best possible scenario by this point), it more or less ends up being a sad reminder that Russell Crowe, the Oscar winning actor of high repute, actively doesn't give a s**t. And yes, Russell Crowe is in this movie and yes he does play Dr. Jekyl/Dr. Jekyl with a Cockney accent and yellow eyes. His choice to play the dual role like a drunken rendition of The Green Goblin is actually kind of admirable if you put the right lens against it - like Jesse Eisenberg in Baman V. Superman Ice Cream (2016) only with slightly less to do.

Please Alan, don't bring this franchise back from the dead!

I'm honestly at a loss at this point. Despite many attempts, not a single major studio has managed to match the chops of the Marvel Extended Universe, and I'm starting to think it's not even possible anymore. The Mummy has thrown both figuratively and literally the elastic man himself Tom Cruise at this problem and the only thing that came out of it is a busy, bloated and offensively dull movie with one of the most disappointing non-endings since Pushing Daisies (2007-2009).

Final Grade: F