Review of The Mummy (2017) by Ethan J — 13 Jun 2017

'THE MUMMY' was Alex Kurtzman's directorial debut, and stars Tom Cruise, Sophia Boutella and Annabelle Wallis. ?After unearthing an ancient Prison, Nick Morton(Tom Cruise) is chosen by an ancient, mumified princess(Sofia Boutella) to be the body of the God of Death. With the help of Jenny(Annabelle Wallis) and Henry(Russel Crowe), he must find a way to stop the curse before he becomes the God of Death.

I'm sad to say that the 'Dark Universe' is not of to a good start. That is sad to say because I really like some of the ideas and characters in this movie. Tom Cruise tries his best to make it float and keeps the hamster wheel spinning. Russel Crowe is awesome as his character(who I will not spoil for you!). There are a lot of interesting concepts in this movie that I will be very interested to see expand in future instalments. Despite all of this, it's a messy, incoherent mess that has very little other than Cruise and Crowe keeping it alive.

The plot of this movie is very clustered and very little thought went into it. They shoehorn a LOT of expostion in to the movie. I will honestly argue that 10% of this movie's script was exposition. That doesn't sound bad but that is still 12 whole minutes of screen time wasted. I get setting stuff up but when the first scene in the film is setting stuff up, you know you've messed up. They also try to set up their 'Dark Universe' which would have been fine if they didn't focus so much on it. This should have been called 'Dark Universe' and in tiny print 'featuring the mummy' because that is what it is; a feature length commercial for this new universe and that is not okay. The film comes first; not the world.

Now that my gripes surrounding the 'plot' are out of the way, lets concentrate on the cast. As stated before, both Cruise and Crowe do great jobs and carry the movie. Sadly, they are not the only two characters. Sophia Boutella was very weak as 'The Mummy' and was about as bland and generic as villains come. Her motivation was nonsensical, she lacked any real threatening qualities and she was a side character in HER OWN MOVIE. Annabelle Wallis was also really weak as Jenny and, to paraphrase the late great Roger Ebert 'I don't believe her and Cruise were even on the same set, they had that little chemistry'. Again, not his exact words but I'm borrowing the phrase nonetheless.

The cinematography for this movie is meh at best. It was well shot, I will say that, but the editing and lighting and everything else was so poorly done. The effects were sub-par and didn't look in the least bit realistic. The costume design was pretty lazy and generic but the set design was very inventive and cool.

Some of the action in this movie was fine. Some of the comedy worked. Some of the horror worked. That is actually the best way to describe this movie. Some of everything worked but not enough to make the movie great. Alas, as much as I really wanted to like this movie, I can't say I recommend it and I'll rate it a pretty generous 4 ?scenes-of-overly-complicated-exposition-and-stupid-explaining... out of 10, purely for Cruise and Crowe alone.