31 Days of Horror Reviews 2018: The Mummy (2017)
The Mummy starring Tom Cruise is an unimaginative and unoriginal movie that should’ve stayed buried in the sands along with its top billed actor.
REVIEW
It’s hard to really start what this movie does wrong, so I’ll just start with what was right or at least was a good idea: Princess Ahmanet. I actually thought it was a good idea to make the mummy a female simply because it was something different. Sofia Boutella played a very convincing villain with the amount of screen time she was given and had the movie been successful, we would’ve seen her alongside the other monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein. The sad part is that that’s where the good things about the movie end.
How she becomes a mummy in the first place wasn’t because of a forbidden love affair, but because after the pharaoh gains a newborn son that would inherit the throne of Egypt instead of her, she vows revenge and makes a deal with Set. She murders her father and brother, then chooses a person to become the vessel for Set by driving a dagger through his heart but is stopped and buried alive in what would later become Iraq. Even as I write this I can’t believe how unnecessarily complicated this is. The whole murdering part is enough of a reason for mummification, everything else should be saved for future movies.
Tom Cruise plays our “hero” Nick Morton, a sergeant in the military who makes a living selling antiquities on the black market. Why does this guy have to represent the military like this? Why couldn’t he be an archaeologist? Or better yet, a mercenary? The military doesn’t need to be involved in a story about a mummy. He releases Ahmanet from her prison and because of this, he’s chosen by her to be the new vessel of Set which makes him invincible from anything even a plane crash.
Add in a cursed ghost version of his friend that only he can see, a reanimated mummy that can turn people into zombies, Crusader knights and a S.H.I.E.L.D.-esque organization run by a man with overwhelming identity issues (Jekyll and Hyde) along with more exposition when the movie is already half over, there’s no longer any trace of this being a mummy movie except for the character.
The whole problem with The Mummy is that it tries to be Iron Man, The Avengers, The Walking Dead, Mission Impossible and every summer blockbuster instead of being THE MUMMY! It’s nothing more than a shameless copy of cliches and ideas from more superior horror films. How the whole movie is crafted suggests going back to the drawing board and make a better film. It suffers from an overloaded storyline, an illogical plot, disjointed tone and passable acting. From what I’ve seen so far in regard to the classics, the charm that they had was in their simplicity. For 2017, the writers thought adding in so much motivation and plot details would automatically make a good movie. Maybe for a crossover like The Avengers or Captain America: Civil War, but not in the first entry of a shared universe, especially coming from a studio that invented the concept in the 1940s. And isn’t that poetic? Universal gave birth to the shared universe and with the release of this movie, they’ve all but killed it.