Review: Dark Universe - "The Mummy"

KURTZMAN, Alex (Dir.), “The Mummy”, Universal Pictures/Perfect World/Sean Daniel Company/Secret Hideout, 2017.

At what point in putting together a movie, do you stand back and say, “wait guys – this is a bunch of crap.” Surely, as costume designer, or an art director, you get to look at the script and say, “hang on – this is all a bit shit. Why am I working so hard on this?” Obviously, the answer is “never”, because by the time the artistic people and the talent get to look at the project, five guys in a room somewhere after a fat lunch have already signed off on it. And everyone else just goes along for the ride. I’m betting there is an army of set dressers, art concept people, location scouts, wardrobe toilers, carpenters, sparkies, painters and scene lighters who will look back on this film and say “well, at least the pay cheque was good.”

So, is this a bad film? In that it has all the elements for a classic mummy tale, no it isn’t; it’s what the studio has attempted to graft on top of it that makes it a complete nonsense. Let me explain. Instead of just re-booting the classic “Mummy” film from 1932 (which is a solid gold classic), they have decided to re-imagine the entire series of Universal Monsters movies, making them an integrated whole within a “Dark Universe”. Therefore, “The Mummy” gets to be the springboard, setting up everything that happens next, rather than being its own thing. It’s Universal doing a Marvel Cinematic Universe, but with monsters instead of superheroes.

To this end, this film is littered with references from all of the Universal Monster classics, past and present. In one scene, we see the petrified hand of the “Gill Man” from “Creature from the Black Lagoon”; there’s a human skull with long canines, foreshadowing “Dracula”; at one point our heroine defeats a troublesome goon by bashing him on the head with The Book of the Dead from Stephen Sommers’ Mummy flick; and our doomed hero is constantly pestered to just kill himself by his undead buddy, a la “An American Werewolf in London”. Even one of the skulls in Dr. Jekyll’s Frankensteinian laboratory looked significantly like it had once belonged to “The Phantom of the Opera”. Online geek channels will no doubt gloat about spotting these ‘easter eggs’ in the coming weeks, arguing over which scene really contained the Invisible Man, but, seriously? Why not just make a Mummy movie and be done with it?

There were some interesting things going on here. Ahmenet (Sofia Boutella), the eponymous mummy, was nicely realised, with all the strange tattoos and freaky eyes, but here the film borrowed far too heavily on Sommers’ previous trilogy. Weird faces in the sand, rampaging bugs, a bit with a London double-decker bus; even a whole pre-credit sequence outlining her backstory – there is a point where ‘homage’ gives way to ‘we just couldn’t think of anything new’. I did like the rats, though.

As far as the mummy story went, unimaginative as it is in this iteration, it seems that the best the producers could think of was to flip the genders on the main characters. Now there’s no longer a hubris-laden Imhotep tracking down his reincarnated lover across the ages; they’ve gone all H. Rider Haggard on us and given us a female mummy with a male Chosen One. They couldn’t have borrowed the storyline more if they’d named the mummy Ayesha. And of course, because the Chosen One is being played by Tom Cruise, all the female characters in the flick have to swoon over him and circle willingly in his orbit. Hollywood has decreed that female characters in films cannot possibly drive the action, and this film does nothing to mollify that attitude.

Cruise is definitely not a draw card for me. I dislike him intensely and therefore it takes something extra for me to go and see a film with him in it. It’s not just that he unceremoniously dumped ‘Our Nicole’ (something which Australians will never overlook) it’s just that he’s a certifiable loon, positively reeking with The Crazy. That being said though, I’ve never seen him turn in a bad performance. Whether he’s preparing to bomb Hitler, or railing about VietNam Vets’ rights from a wheelchair, or scaling a super-tall building in Abu Dhabi, he always brings his A-game, and it seriously shits me. Even in this movie, he brings the gusto, and I almost felt sorry for him, because the script let him down, not his acting chops. The character which he’s meant to portray is so loosely drawn, so badly imagined, that any actor with less skill than Cruise couldn’t have turned in this good a performance (and good it ain’t). It starts off as Brendan Fraser in “The Mummy”, turns into David Naughton from “An American Werewolf in London”, and then falls into a parody of himself playing the Vampire Lestat. Like the rest of the film, the character was obliterated in service to the over-arching need to establish the Dark Universe, and we’ll see him again in the “Dracula” re-boot, no doubt.

The material which this movie is actually about, is a secret organisation sworn to identify, oppose, neutralise, study and destroy Evil, wherever it manifests in the world. Known as the Prodigium, it is led, rather dubiously I have to say, by Dr. Henry Jekyll, as portrayed by Russell ‘Rusty’ Crowe. Why some guy who needs an anti-Evil shot every ten minutes and who has trouble keeping his medication within arm’s reach is in charge of such a group is anybody’s guess, but I figure that the producers were just trying to think of any way that they could claim the character as one of their own. With Rusty is The Girl (Annabelle Wallis) who, like Cruise’s character, is a tissue-thin agglomeration of motives, most of which are subordinate to Cruise winning the day. Since she survives the mummy encounter, I assume she will form some of the glue that binds the next movie in the Dark Universe series.

If you’re expecting a film with a monster as its main antagonist here, you will be very disappointed. The monster is almost completely incidental to everything else. This is a silly action flick in which Tom Cruise (‘cursed’ to be immune from harm and from death) gets beaten up repeatedly by the monster’s minions (which, if you’ve seen the Brendan Fraser films, offers nothing new in the realm of people vs. dried-up mummy fights). The funny bits aren't funny, the serious bits are implausible and the rest is just cheap "the cat jumps out of the shadows" moments. With Rusty the Plot Exposition Fairy stating the bleeding obvious all the way through, you will weigh the needs of your bladder during this outing more highly than the cost of your entry ticket.

My advice? Wait for the DVD. Rent it if possible. Two Tentacled Horrors.