It’s no mummy of all scary movies
THE MUMMY
BLOCKBUSTERS have always had a lot on their shoulders – after all, you don’t spend a great deal of time and money on a movie unless you’re expecting that movie to provide a sizeable return on investment.
But lately it seems that expectations for such bigticket movies are even greater.
The Fate of the Furious had to keep a successful franchise motoring along at top speed, for instance.
Wonder Woman had to change the perception of female-led superhero movies, which it seems to have pulled off.
And now we have The Mummy, which can’t simply be a supernatural actionadventure pitting Tom Cruise against the black-magical Egyptian princess he accidentally raised from the dead.
No, it has to launch a whole new “Dark Universe” series of spooky stories that’ll supposedly tie together tales of Frankenstein’s Monster, the Bride of Frankenstein, the Invisible Man and others in one big monstrous mosaic.
Based on The Mummy, the whole enterprise is off to a perfectly competent but frankly uninspiring beginning … which means things can only get better, right? Let’s hope so.
But rather than judge this movie as the first ingredient in an ongoing monster mash, let’s instead see how (and indeed if) it works as its own thing.
It actually starts strongly enough, with Cruise’s Nick and his sidekick Vail (Jake Johnson) shirking their military duties in Iraq to loot local antiquities, a scheme that goes wrong when a missile strike uncovers a subterranean tomb.
It’s the resting place of Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), whose lust for power led her to conjure up and collaborate with dark forces.
As punishment, she was mummified and entombed alive for millennia.
Now she’s awake and none too pleased about it.
And while she searches London for an ancient relic that’ll enable her to rule the world, Nick – who has been, shall we say, changed by his encounter with Ahmanet – must do all he can to stop her, with a little help from comely scientist Jenny (Annabelle Wallis).
Oh, and also providing assistance is Jenny’s boss at a top-secret organisation dedicated to researching and combating the forces of evil – a nice doctor named Jekyll and his nasty alter ego, Hyde, both played with thick, tasty slices of hamminess by Russell Crowe.
Once The Mummy leaves the desert and touches down (or rather crash-lands) in London, it doesn’t so much go off the rails as start spinning its wheels.
There’ll be a chase or a fight (usually between Nick and a bunch of Ahmanet’s undead, unthreatening minions), followed by a stretch of Jekyll explaining a bit of background history or whatever, then the chasing and/or fighting resumes.
It’s all staged and performed professionally enough, but there’s precious little about it that thrills, chills or captivates, and that doesn’t bode well for the next instalments in the saga.