The Mummy, film review: Tomb and gloom

Universal drags its classic movie monsters out of their graves for a new cinematic franchise — they should have been left to rest in peace, says Matthew Norman
Matthew Norman17 November 2017

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, say hello to the Dark Universe. And now, having graciously welcomed Universal’s attempt to milk the cash cow of interconnecting heroes and monsters, à la Marvel and DC, bid it farewell.

But perhaps I’m jumping the gun. Maybe this embryonic franchise will survive its birth. If an ancient Egyptian princess can be revived by a glance from Tom Cruise, who are we to read the last rites to a whole universe after one cinematic megaflop?

On this form, however, the Dark Universe should prove easier to kill off than Princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), who we meet in a sarcophagus beneath the Iraqi desert.

How she found her late self 1,000 miles from the Valley of the Kings is one among many questions raised for which life, even a life as long as hers, is too short. As with the other conundra — such as why Cruise’s character mistakes a short stick for a viable weapon against a supernatural killing machine — why obsess over the detail when the writers and director Alex Kurtzman couldn’t be bothered?

The first bleak chuckle comes in the first moment, courtesy of the legend “Welcome to a new world of gods and monsters”. That’s a cheeky way to launch another version of a title Universal first released in 1932 and has often remade since. That masterstroke of accidental irony sets the tone. Every subsequent laugh is unintended and wintry.

For all that, the first half hour has enough pace, visual distraction and Indiana Jonesy panache to hold the attention, despite the confusion raised by two separate burial sites. One is beneath London, where Crossrail engineers postpone work (yup, the one thing the project needs is more delays) after chancing on the tombs of 12th-century crusader knights. Somehow, the artefacts stored there are devilishly connected with others found in a second site near Mosul.

Cruise’s Nick Morton, who steals the antiquities the US army pays him to protect, stumbles on the catacomb of Princess Ahmanet. She was mummified 5,000 years ago as punishment for murdering her father and the newborn brother who blocked her path to the Egyptian throne. You can appreciate her irritation. The law that a boy is preferred in the royal succession over an older sister is so insanely archaic that our Parliament repealed it as long ago as 2013.

But Ahmanet took the grudge a bit far by forming an allegiance with Set, god of destruction. Evil she certainly is. Even today, the discovery of this one-woman WMD beneath the Iraqi sand would get Tony Blair off the hook.

After returning to life, Ahmanet gets the hots for Morton. He has eyes only for archeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis). But in love, as elsewhere, Ahmanet’s a fighter not a quitter.

While Nick and Jenny have some biology thanks to the previous coupling about which they witlessly josh, there is no chemistry between Wallis and Cruise. He seems as indifferent to her as everything else.

Be it tragic, astounding or terrifying — a friend’s death; the plane crash from which, to no one’s surprise, he emerges without a scratch; attacks from marauding beetles, spiders and rats — Cruise reacts with the same, vaguely puzzled look of the middle-aged man who can’t find his keys.

Luckily, the one emotion Cruise convincingly projects — lack of interest in this film — is the one with which audiences will most easily empathise.

When the action mysteriously switches to London, Russell Crowe pops up as Dr Edward Jekyll, the smug and plummy-voiced curator of the museum of evil he calls the Predigium. Presumably Jekyll has been purloined so that he and demonic alter ego Edward Hyde (whom Crowe briefly unleashes with a misguided cockney brogue) can replicate the scientist/monster double act of Marvel’s Bruce Banner and The Hulk.

The Mummy, in pictures

1/5

By accepting that his gladiatorial days are behind him and allowing himself to become so chunky, Crowe has aged with more dignity than Cruise. Approaching 55, Cruise’s cocky boyish charm has worn thin. An actor of his underrated talent should have buried the action man persona long ago.

Like Crowe, he knows he is slumming it here. A madly over-expository script — do we need reminding that the gods have been angered while watching the forces of hell maraud in all their CGI glory? — almost hints at a pastiche of every monster B-movie in the Universal catalogue. But only almost.

In fact, the movie aims to enrapture with digital pyrotechnics, captivate with a fresh take on the mummy’s curse, and petrify with such a haphazard rounding up of the usual horror suspects that they should have added Godzilla and Voldemort to the roster and been done with it.

Almost as aggravating as Cruise’s frozen-faced disengagement is the failure to explore Osirian mythology to give the film an infusion of savour. The classic Seventies Doctor Who story The Pyramids of Mars, in which Set, aka Sutekh, is revived from stasis, is a handy guide.

“Death is but the door to new life,” concludes the legend of the opening shot. Long before the closing shot you’ll be praying to Horus, Anubis, Ra and all the gods that this deathly drivel is but the door to death for the Dark Universe. May it rest in peace, and never be awoken.

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