Review of The Mummy (2017) by Thequietgamer — 12 Oct 2017

Setting out to create their own cinematic universe, Universal Pictures resurrects "The Mummy" as a tonally inconsistent star vehicle for Tom Cruise. It wants to be a horror movie, but constantly shoehorns in humor and action reminiscent of Marvel's superhero films in order to ensure mainstream appeal. It's efforts to set up the larger world of this "Dark Universe" consisting of rebooted versions of Universal's classic monster properties is interesting, but muddled. It is yet unclear how everything is going to come together. That's not the problem. The problem is that after this sorry introduction, I'm not very interested in learning how.

It's hard to care about anything happening onscreen. The story is a bit of a mess, the dialog is incredibly cliché, and the characters are bland stereotypes. The most interesting aspects are the horror ones, which unfortunately are neutered in order to not scare away the general public. I'm sorry, but I thought these were supposed to be monster movies. You can pretty much predict everything that's going to happen so any excitement is automatically drained away. Tome Cruise hams it up while playing his typical smarmy guy role that he's just getting too old for. Everyone else is just kind of there, including Russell Crowe who has a surprisingly minor and practically useless role in the film. Somebody's just there for that cinematic universe money (good luck with that). The sole shinning light in this whole ordeal is Sofia Boutella. While she plays a totally weak villain, she does manage to be drop dead sexy in the process and show some much appreciated skin.

There's a lot going on in this reboot of The Mummy. Almost none of it is any good. It's manages to capture all of the worst qualities of a Tom Cruise movie. It's a flat, stale, and pandering effort that will leave the majority of viewers bored and wanting so much more. A poor way to kick off a cinematic universe. Universal would have honestly just been better off keeping the also vanilla "Dracula Untold" as their first step. While only marginally better, at least that one was likely to have more of a following. Skip this. If this one hasn't already derailed their plans, we're all better off just waiting to see what Universal comes up with next for their Dark Universe. Outside of Sofia Boutella's butt, there's nothing here worth seeing, and you can google that. Things are very "dark" indeed.

3.