June 11, 2017 · Watch the official trailer
Don’t mistake “The Mummy” for award-winning cinema fare.
But the new monster/action film starring Tom Cruise is exactly the kind of summer popcorn blockbuster entertainment moviegoers have gotten used to over the past decade.
Short on plot and heavy on premature franchise building, “The Mummy” tries to run before it can walk, occasionally tripping and falling flat on its face. However, there are moments that genuinely work in director Alex Kurtzman’s film.
Cruise stars as Nick Morton, a soldier of fortune who stumbles across a secret Egyptian tomb hiding the sarcophagus of an evil princess buried alive. When the mummified princess breaks out of her coffin on a plane ride to London, chaos ensues as the mummy attempts to destroy humanity and reshape the world in her image.
While it’s no shock to see Cruise in yet another action film, “The Mummy” is a curious choice for the veteran actor. Aside from the one airplane sequence already made famous in the trailers, there’s really no death-defying stunts moviegoers have come to expect from Cruise.
Additionally, “The Mummy” doesn’t really take advantage of Cruise’s natural charm and charisma on screen, which could have buoyed an underdeveloped romance with Annabelle Wallis’ damsel-in-distress Jenny Halsey. Still, Cruise makes the most of a thinly written part and tries valiantly to recreate the magic of his “Mission: Impossible” films to limited success.
Academy Award winner Russell Crowe is perhaps the movie’s biggest question mark, playing the leader of a monster hunting organization with a secret monster past of his own. Serving mostly to explain the plot in narration and bridge the gap with eventual future films, Crowe does a decent enough job bringing his character to life. Yet at the same time, the whole part feels a tad unnecessary in the grand scheme of “The Mummy.”
“New Girl” star Jake Johnson gives the best performance in the film as Morton’s partner Chris Vail, bringing much needed levity to the heavy, slow-plodding script of “The Mummy.” As written on the page, Vail isn’t a character to write home about, but Johnson delivers each line with frantic gusto and wills the comedy to work.
“The Mummy” herself, Sofia Boutella, has more lines than one might expect from a traditional mummy and is more compelling in her demonic post-mummification persona than as an Egyptian princess in flashbacks. There is a scare factor to her character, though Kurtzman and Boutella keep the horror origins of the character to a minimum in service of a more science-fiction, comic book tone.
Like her turn in “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” there’s not much depth in Boutella’s performance though most of the film’s better moments are in action scenes featuring Boutella.
Where “The Mummy” ventures most off track is when the film tries too hard to set up future installments of Universal Studios’ planned “Dark Universe” franchise, reboots of classic movie monsters like “Dracula,” “Frankenstein” and “The Invisible Man.”
Rather than flesh out the plot with additional run-ins with “The Mummy,” unnecessary attention is paid to Crowe’s monster-hunting organization in order to tie in this current film with movies that haven’t even enter production yet. It’s a reckless decision that prevents “The Mummy” from becoming much more than average popcorn fodder.
More so than many films on screen right now, “The Mummy” is a classic turn off your brain and enjoy film. Moviegoers wanting a relaxing, fun time at the cinema could do worse than a middle-of-the-pack action film starring heavy hitters like Cruise and Crowe.
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