Not much can be said in favor of Universal's newest reboot of a classic. The Mummy looks and feels nothing like any mummy movie we've ever seen. Gone is the aching romance and mysticism of the 1932 original; skipped over are the kinetic energy and joyous good humor of the 1999 Stephen Sommers remake and its sequels. We are left, instead, with a bizarre mishmash of half-baked ideas, flagrant borrowing from other (better) horror films, and a spectacle that is anything but spectacular.
We start with an older, supposedly more mature Tom Cruise and his partner (played by Jake Johnson) slaughtering "Iraqi insurgents" in an attempt to hunt a mysterious hidden treasure. Whether the sequence is meant to be an ironic statement on American horrors in the Middle East or if it's just using the tragic and unnecessary war plaguing millions of people as a "relevant" plot device, the whole thing is undeniably tasteless. The duo eventually, of course, discover a hidden tomb and desecrate it by removing the sarcophagus via helicopter. Never mind the enormous camel spiders or the pool of seething mercury, everything will be just fine.
Enter the ladies, who certainly don't seem to mind being cast in archetypal roles. Annabelle Wallis (The Tudors, Annabelle) plays a young archaeologist whose one-night stand with Cruise informs their relationship, in which he repeatedly saves her. She has almost no other purpose, except to introduce Cruise to a secret society of anti-evil fighters, but more of that later. Sofia Boutella then enters as the mummy herself, Princess Ahmanet, who is revived and quickly becomes the incarnation of evil or something. There's a minor plot point or two about her past, using men to gain power and selling her soul to the god Set (god of storms, violence, and the desert, which seems appropriate), but basically she's a two-eyed, four-pupilled, tattooed megalomaniac who wants to destroy London by turning glass back into sand. Work it, sweetie.
Cruise's character Nick Morton, however, has a psychic connection to the mummy. His friend and partner-in-crime was possessed (via a bug entering his ear) by Ahmanet's power and attacked the plane ferrying the sarcophagus before being killed by Morton. Having miraculously survived the plane crash, Morton (oh, wow, I totally didn't get the "mort" thing in a movie about the undead, imagine that) is haunted by the wisecracking phantasm of his buddy while navigating this new violent world of gods and monsters. Speaking of which, his not-quite-girlfriend is a secret member of the secret society with some secret silly name (Prodigity? Prodigium? Problematic?) that not-so-secretly hunts and eliminates secret threats. In their secret headquarters are secretly housed secret artifacts and mementos of their secret successes, including what looks like a claw/flipper/hand of one Gillman from a (no doubt secret) black lagoon.
The prodigious (pragmatic? prognostic? presbyterian?) secret society is headed by one Dr. Henry Jekyll (yes, that Dr. Jekyll), played by Russell Crowe. Why, exactly, Jekyll/Hyde is a character here is a debate best held elsewhere, but there is little that works about his presence. We're not quite sure if his methods are moral, we're not quite sure why he wants what he wants or does what he does, and we don't really care about all that because we're just waiting for his transformation scene. The character's presence does not mesh at all with the themes of a mummy movie, and it doesn't pair well with this mummy movie, but it does effectively feed my curiosity about where Universal's Dark Universe might go. Namely because Jekyll/Hyde was not one of the classic Universal monsters. But since the character is in the public domain, and since Abbott and Costello met him (played by Boris Karloff, who was also the original Mummy) in 1953, Universal obviously seems to think it'll work.
Unfortunately, Universal also thought this movie was going to work. Granted, I'd agree that this was a better starting place for their Dark Universe than Dracula Untold, though I'm not sure why they're casting that fun little flick aside now. It's just a shame that the writers (and producers, apparently desperate for a studio franchise) couldn't be more original. They stole and borrowed and adapted so much from so many sources that the film boasts nothing substantial to recommend itself. And while this movie is fun and exciting for a lazy summer afternoon -- I enjoyed it, but then I'm down with most monster movies -- it's a sad excuse for what has come before, and for what might have been.
IMDb: The Mummy
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