The Mummy – The sarcophagus should not have been open…
War of the Movies: 5.0/10
Metascore: 34/100
RottenTomatoes: 17%
Directed by Alex Kurtzman
Released on June 9, 2017
Running Time: 110 minutes
Starring: Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Annabelle Wallis, Jake Johnson
A soldier-of-fortune and his partner, along side an archaeologist, finds a tomb of an ancient mummy, the corpse of the Egyptian Princess Ahmanet. Wanting to bring back the sarcophagus for examination and research, they unleash an evil power more forceful than anything that ever walk the earth and they must find a way to stop her before it is too late for humanity.
Universal Pictures created what they call the Dark Universe, a concept that will bring back all the old monsters, such as The Invisible Man (who will be played by Johnny Depp) and Frankenstein (Javier Bardem). The Mummy is the first film presented to us from that universe, and all I can say is what a bad way to start! There are so many things wrong with this film I don’t even know where to begin.
Tom Cruise in an Action/Adventure/Comedy film should be good, right? Wrong! No matter how hard he tried, and trust me it shows during the film that he wanted so bad for his jokes and lines to work, we are nowhere near the mimics and charisma of Brendan Fraser, and we are even further from the fantastic Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. Because let’s not kid ourselves, this is exactly what Tom Cruise wanted to achieve, to be able to pull off this kind of character, but he failed miserably. Can you imagine on top of that, not only did the production company find a way to bad cast one of the principal characters, but they bad cast two of them! Annabelle Wallis, who is as stiff and expressionless as a rock, plays an archaeologist who is supposed to appear in the other films of the Dark Universe, unfortunately for us. Whether she was supposed to be scared, confused or happy, she always, and I mean always, has the same damn expression and tone of voice.
And don’t let me start on Chris, the partner of Tom Cruise, played by Jake Johnson who I normally like as a comedy actor in the TV Show New Girl. I guess he was supposed to be the “funny” character, but like almost every joke in this film, it just didn’t work out. His role is completely useless, he pops up from time to time on the screen at odd intervals which got on our nerves pretty fast and didn’t help make us like the movie at all. In fact, I think his character made our experience even worse…
The actors cannot take all the credit for the bad reviews of the film, they must share the blame with the writers! To put it nicely, the script is one big mess, which is disappointing because after the first five minutes, the movie looked promising, but it just goes down hill from there. Even if the actors would have been perfect for this kind of film, it would have help but it still wouldn’t have giving us something very decent to watch. There is too much going on for no reason, it’s hard to know what was the point of the film. Sometimes it looks like they want to scare us, which didn’t really work at all, other times they tried to make us laugh, which didn’t work either. So, in the end, you end up watching a film with uneven actions scenes and useless characters that could have been exploited in a better way. Without saying too much, I personally think one of the biggest flaw of the script is the ending, which doesn’t make much senses and leaves us wanting for an explanation, but none is given to us…
Fortunately, we were grace, though we were beginning to despair, with some positive aspects about the film, mainly the special effects. Those were really well done, although the 3D could have been more exploited, especially for a movie of this type. The airplane scene is impressive, even more when you know that it was not done by CGI and that they actually shoot the scene in a real life Zero G plane, also know as the “Vomit Comet”! That was the only part where the 3D glasses were really worth it. And of course, it wouldn’t be a Mummy film if the monster’s face didn’t appear in the sand, another well done CGI from the film. The sad thing about the actions scenes is that you see most of the interesting ones in the trailer.
There have been some worse films than The Mummy, but there sure as hell have been better ones, and now we can only hope that Universal Pictures will learn from their mistakes and not ruin every older monsters classics, that would be the biggest shame of them all.
Should you see it?
Honestly, wait until it comes out on DVD. I’m pretty sure it will be essential to watch The Mummy for the future Dark Universe films, since they introduce two key characters, Jenny the archaeologist and Dr. Henry Jekyll, but it doesn’t justify the need to pay to see it in theaters.
