Let me interrupt our slow journey through my surplus DVDs and Blu-Rays to watch a more recent film - and one that's been getting quite the pounding in the press since it came out last week - the latest Tom Cruise vehicle The Mummy. In fact, with the sheer amount of drubbing the film has been getting, I was expecting to have to sit through 110 minutes of steaming poop. Did I?
Nick Morton is an US Army Reconnaissance officer who has a nice sideline in tracking down antiquities in the Middle East and stealing them before they get destroyed, so he can sell them on to the highest bidder. Looking for one such item in Iraq, he instead stumbles upon a secret burial chamber, hidden for millenia, where a forgotten Egyptian princess was once buried alive. The princess, Ahmanet, had made a pact with Set for power and killed her father in that quest, and in response her people mummified her alive and buried her in a place thousands of miles from Egypt, under a lake of mercury to prevent her escaping. So of course it isn't long before they've pulled her sarcophagus out of the mercury pool and shipped it back to London. Once awake, the undead and still-powerful Ahmanet sets about putting her plan back into action, and she makes Nick the centre of that plan, keeping him alive so that she can sacrifice him to Set. Nick joins forces with the pretty archeologist he had a one-night stand with and Dr. Henry Jekyll to try to stop Ahmanet and lift the curse she has placed on Nick...
Okay, so The Mummy wasn't quite as bad as I had expected it to be. Russell Crowe as Henry Jekyll and Sofia Boutella as Ahmanet managed to pull the film up from its nosedive into A Cure For Wellness or Rings territory, but unfortunately that's not saying too much. You might remember, if you read my A Cure For Wellness review, that I stated that one thing a film doesn't want to do is remind its audience of other, better films that they could be watching, and The Mummy falls into that trap as well. An American Werewolf in London. Hellraiser. Any of the Blind Dead films. Any of the previous films in the Mummy franchise. And at one point, any film with Michael Caine in it. And perhaps the worst thing? Other than these reminders of other, better films, and the scenes involving Dr. Jekyll, the film was one of the most boring horror-action blockbuster wannabes I've seen. Most of the big setpiece fights were just that - obvious setpieces, and entirely predictable to boot.
Tom Cruise was a big part of this problem, unfortunately. It's pretty clear that the script was set up around Cruise so that he could be the Big Damn Hero all the way through, to the point where he really was doing some superhuman stunts that we were apparently meant to accept without blinking an eye. The biggest one of these was when, during one chase scene through some cobblestoned London streets, Cruise pushes the pretty archaeologist love interest out of the way of a London bus that's careening towards them on its side... and then throws himself through its shattered windscreen only to land perfectly and with barely a hair out of place in a seat several rows back. If the character can pull off things like this when he's still supposed to be a normal human (they forget and remember about the curse that's been placed on him whenever its (in)convenient for the plot), why the hell should we care about him or what happens to him? Apparently Nick Morton was originally going to be called "Tyler Colt", which is right up there with Fridge LargeMeat or Trunk SlamChest for ridiculous macho action hero names, and it also shows how the writers and director were originally thinking when they were writing the many drafts that eventually made this film. Or, to put it another way, you could probably replace Nick Morton with Nathan Drake from the Uncharted video games series and very little, if anything, of the plot would have to be changed.
The Mummy is apparently the first part of Universal's "Dark Universe" franchise, where they plan to bring back all the classic Universal monsters and update them to the modern day. We get to see glimpses of that with Dr. Jekyll and his admittedly wonderful room of artifacts, remains, weapons and more, which include a vampire skull and the arm of the Creature from the Black Lagoon. If they can pull back significantly on the brainless action movie style and give us a lot more of the stuff I just mentioned - and a lot more Russell Crowe who, as I said, damn well saved this film from being utter tripe - then things could be turned around quite nicely for the franchise. But right now this is far from the opening chapter they no doubt hoped for.
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