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In the annals of contemporary Hollywood, there are few actors whose name alone can open a film. Maybe Tom Hanks. Maybe Denzel Washington. One name, though, towers above them despite his short stature. Few names still have cache with the public in terms of sheer stardom more than Tom Cruise. Cruise is also one of the shrewdest actors around, aware of both his image and what makes a hit film. Therefore, one looks upon The Mummy, the first of a planned cinematic universe, with puzzlement on how Tom Cruise and everyone involved in The Mummy failed so spectacularly with this film on every level imaginable.
Long ago, a group of Crusaders bury a knight with a special ruby. This jewel was from the Nile, or rather ancient Egypt. It was part of a dagger used against Egyptian princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), who was set to ascend the Pharoah's throne until a male half-brother was born. She kills her father, the baby mama and the infant, then was about to slice a lover to allow the god Set to take human form when she herself is killed.
Moving on to present-day London and Iraq, you have two sections that eventually blend. The Crusader tomb is found while building a new part of the London Underground. This section is taken over by mysterious figure Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe). In Iraq, renegade Sergeant Nick Morton (Cruise) and his little buddy Corporal Vail (Jake Johnson) are out treasure hunting versus fighting Iraqi insurgents. Fortunately for them, they do bumble their way into an unknown and elaborate Egyptian tomb.
Unfortunately for them, it is that of Ahmanet. British archeologist and Nick's fling Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis) is more intrigued with the tomb than with whatever treasures may be found. Nick and Vail care only for gold but know enough to get out of a dangerous tomb. Vail is bitten by a spider that causes him to fall under Ahmanet's power. He goes on a killing spree and is sadly killed off by Nick.
Is this the end of Vail? Far from it, for he now warns Nick of Ahmanet's power. Ahmanet wants to use Nick to bring Set back and enact her plans for world dominations. Dr. Jekyll and his alter ego now must stop her. The lives and afterlives of everyone are in danger, and it will take Nick becoming a hero to save the world.
The Mummy was intended to kick off a whole new franchise dubbed the Dark Universe, a pun on the Universal Studio name as well as a cinematic universe. The idea was to bring back the classic Universal Studios monsters (the Mummy, the Wolf Man, Dracula, Frankenstein, the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde) into a series of connected films for a long-running film series. The Mummy could not have been a more disastrous launch for such an enterprise. It is to where I jokingly wonder if screenwriters David Koepp, Dylan Kussman and Christopher McQuarrie along with director Alex Kurtzman were paid off by rival studios to deliberately sabotage the Dark Universe.
The Mummy never took the time to genuinely set things up. Part of the problem is that The Mummy has essentially two starts. We start with the Crusader burial in 1127 England, then we get Crowe's voiceover telling us of Ahmanet. You know that these stories are eventually going to meld, but it does seem rather convoluted to have so much stuffed before the opening credits. Add to that the rather distasteful part of having Ahmanet kill an infant, and you are playing with fire.
The Mummy is spreading itself too thin with its set up, but then despite its almost two-hour runtime seems desperate to rush though things. So much time is spent on an action sequence in Mesopotamia (which the film helpfully reminds the audience is now Iraq) that people who walked in late might have thought they had walked into the newest Mission: Impossible film by mistake. We never get a proper introduction to Nick, or Vail, or Jenny. Having already barely gotten a vague introduction to Ahmanet and not getting much if any introduction for Crowe or his Dr. Jekyll (here almost always called "Henry"), audiences can't latch on to who these characters are.
I think The Mummy was too obsessed with being wall-to-wall action to bother trying to make the characters interesting. The film certainly gave what it thought were exciting action sequences, such as a crashing airplane. However, that led to more questions than answers. Jenny tells the soldiers taking Ahmanet's sarcophagus back to Britain not to shoot Vail because the plane is pressurized, but shortly afterwards Nick shoots Vail three times. The plane does crash, but the debris seems to be spread over an excessively wide area. If The Mummy is to be believed, the various corpses, including a still remarkably fit then-55-year-old Cruise, could be recovered but the sarcophagus is still being sought at the crash site.
The film desperately tries to be exciting, with constant action sequences and Brian Tyler's bombastic score pounding out the menace and danger of it all. Neither helped: the action sequences were shockingly boring and lifeless, the music overblown and almost incessant.
The Mummy also seems unaware of what it actually wants to be. Whenever Jake Johnson appears, it almost seems to want to be a comedy. His postmortem scenes look like a rip-off of An American Werewolf in London. Vail, for reasons I'm not sure anyone can explain, prattles on to Nick about how he repeated shot Vail. He's a corpse that only Nick can see, so that would make him a ghost. However, I think he is also a literal corpse. I say this because at the end, Vail is fully human, Nick using his powers to bring him back to life (and setting him up for future Dark Universe films). I figure Vail was going to be the comic relief in this hoped-for franchise, but it did not pan out.
As a side note, Jake Johnson, who did the best he could with what he was given, may have the rare distinction of being one of the few people who manages to look shorter than Tom Cruise on screen.
I think Cruise went into The Mummy with high hopes of creating another franchise. He took a stab at comedy with Nick, who was meant to be a quippy type of fellow. In his first scene, he rebukes Vail for suggesting that he is a grave robber. He tells Vail that they are "liberators of precious antiquities". Nick did not come across as a daring man of action with a way with women and weapons. He came across as an idiot. It does not help when it looks like at one point that Tom Cruise is close to getting raped by a corpse.
Wallis' Jenny was so blank that she is hardly worth mentioning. To be fair, Jenny was a poorly written character: she was not particularly smart, not interesting and wavered between being a potential love interest and being irritated by Nick. Crowe thought that underplaying Henry (again, the use of Jekyll is curious), he could make Jekyll come across as mysterious. It had the opposite effect of making us not take any of this seriously, but not in a good way.
There is nothing in The Mummy that is good. It is not fun. It is not scary. It is not interesting. It is just there.
If The Mummy was created to be the first of many monster films, it failed in spades. The Dark Universe franchise died with The Mummy. Perhaps it is fitting that this living corpse of a film killed off yet another film series that I think few people wanted.
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