The Mummy **½ (2017, Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Annabelle Wallis, Jake Johnson, Courtney B Vance, Russell Crowe) – Movie Review

There is no doubt that The Mummy is a great looker in IMAX 3D. It is a quite brilliant production, with astounding state-of-the-art visual effects, photography and set designs, and that is a good start. But the movie has little character, personality or warmth, and no logic, and, as it could so easily have had all these, that is a real shame.

The film’s other main asset is Sofia Boutella, who is also a great looker as evil ancient Egyptian princess Ahmanet, awakened from her crypt beneath the desert in Mesopotamia (currently Iraq, we are told), by tomb raiders Nick Morton and Chris Vail (Tom Cruise, Jake Johnson) and lovely English scientist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis).

She brings her malevolence grown over millennia to present-day London, where the trio bring her, and then of course she wreaks the usual havoc and terror on the Brits in a plot that certainly defies human comprehension. As if we don’t have enough problems in the UK currently! Never mind, the film moves fast enough, is flashy enough and is short enough at an hour and three quarters not to give you time to ask too many questions or get bored. Best not to think, just sit back and enjoy, and then you can.

The other really great thing about this The Mummy reboot is that it attempts to be a serious piece of work, and gets real with itself as a scary horror movie. It kind of has to, as it is spearheading Universal’s Dark Universe franchise. It has occasional flashes of its previous, more entertaining incarnation with Brendan Fraser’s The Mummy (1999) as an adventure entertainment, but quickly gives this up in favour of being a scare ride. That has its advantages in terms of excitement, but disadvantages in terms of making the movie just one note serious, more or less abandoning any attempt at humour, and that gives its star Cruise a problem.

His role is very one note and he can’t do much with it except be there. It gives him the chance to play to only one of the three things he’s good at – running! And, boy does he run well. He’s 55, runs like a 25-year-old and doesn’t look a day older than 35, however big the IMAX close-up, however harsh the lighting or unflattering the camera angle. He even thinks it’s a good idea to flash the well in-shape body and actually coyly get naked. But here he has no chance to give a workout for his other strengths – flash the big Cruise grin or even shout either. It’s a low-key, soft-spoken performance, a bit bland but entirely acceptable.

Unfortunately, he has no rapport with the heroine, and she none with him. Wallis’s performance is as flat as a pancake, producing a big hole in the movie, as Cruise’s character is motivated and redeemed by his growing thing for hers. But they obviously don’t care, so we don’t. A key scene is missing from the movie, the one where the couple first meet and, er, couple. This could have been sexy and made us interested in them and their fate. But this meeting, a brief encounter that she walked off from apparently, is just referred to and talked about a lot, cue the film’s more or less sole attempt at humour, falling flat.

After all these years, we have come to realise that Cruise isn’t really a funny kind of guy and Wallis is an ice maiden, Miss Frigidaire. Johnson is also supposed to be amusing, it seems, but that idea doesn’t fly either. There are only six characters in the movie, and the sixth and last is Courtney B Vance as US Colonel Greenway, a cypher role that gets nowhere. That leaves Russell Ira Crowe, cast as Dr Henry Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the lip-smacking villain of the piece, one played as a New Zealand posh Englishman, the other as a New Zealand common Cockney. Crowe is arch and tries to be camp and moustache twiddling, but he is quite bad, and no fun at all. After all these years, we have come to realise that Crowe isn’t really a funny kind of guy either.

Thank goodness, then, for Boutella, the hit turn and showstopper. She’s got the stuff and flaunts it. I fear they must be planning a Jekyll and Hyde movie with Crowe, but what they should be planning is a Ahmanet movie with Boutella. There is also a strong hint at the end that Cruise and Johnson could be back for a new ‘adventure’. Oh dear.

[Spoiler alert] There’s a lot of good sides and bad sides stuff, Cruise’s Nick is conflicted, drawn to Ahmanet’s dark side, while idiot spiders turn Johnson’s Chris into a dark side zombie, before his return to human life for the sequel, and Wallis’s Jenny becomes one of Ahmanet’s undead before she somehow resurrects back to to human life too. All this deep, highfalutin’ nonsense probably sounded clever in the screenplay by David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie and Dylan Kussman, but it hasn’t reached the screen in an interesting, coherent way. Three different writers, including the director, penned the screen story, so it looks like a case of too many cooks, nervous film-making by committee.

Nevertheless, they have worked hard to give us a passable, decent enough horror blockbuster. It will probably have a long shelf life, and play well on DVD at home and later as a midnight movie on TV. Like Tom Cruise, it looks like it will run and run.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Movie Review

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