‘The Mummy’:
‘Mummy’ starts out exciting but then stumbles and never recovers
The Tom Cruise movie, left, starts out exciting, but then it stumbles and doesn’t recover.
Tom Cruise is his own genre and his own quality control. If you buy a ticket to one of his movies, there are certain things you can expect, all of them good. You can expect action scenes that are exciting and then top themselves, that start out exhilarating and end up jawdropping. You can expect a script that’s a cut above the usual, an intelligent leading lady (often British) who commands the screen, and for Cruise to look exactly the way he did 20 years ago.
“The Mummy” delivers on those expectations, but it doesn’t stay at that level. Yes, the
leading lady is smart and British and at the center of the action, and Cruise’s looks remain on Cruise-control at a steady 35. But the movie gradually gets dragged into the summer muck, with a few action sequences that look like something out of “Pirates of the Caribbean.”
Still, this is a Tom Cruise movie, and that means that nothing is phoned in. Early in the movie, he is in modernday Iraq, playing Nick, a thief specializing in ancient relics. Along with his partner in crime (Jake Johnson) and Jenny (Annabelle Wallis), a specialist in ancient civilizations, he stumbles onto an ancient grave site buried hundreds of feet underground.
The grave site is in itself a masterful cinematic creation. At each corner, there is an Egyptian Anubis (you know, the dog-headed human) looking inward. There are carvings and eerie-looking statues and a pool of liquid mercury covering a sarcophagus. Even from a safe seat in the audience, it looks like we should not be there.
Everything in the first half hour is superb and consistent with an action adventure of the highest order. Cruise is at his blithe yet intense best, and the setup is arresting. We know from a flashback — a way-back flashback to ancient Egypt — that there was a princess (Sofia Boutella) who was so evil they had to mummify her while she was still alive. So waking her up is probably not a good idea.
Early on, there’s an airplane crash sequence that even tops the one Steven Spielberg devised for “Bridge of Spies” — remember that one? This one in “The Mummy” is harrowing, with Cruise and Wallis getting thrown from one side of the plane to the other, tumbling and banging off walls, with no chance to right themselves or plan an escape. And outside the window, the ground is hurtling toward them.
But it’s right then, just as it seems that “The Mummy” will go from high point to high point and only get better, that the movie is at its peak. The problem, as we soon see, is the story, which holds no surprises, at least for the movie’s lengthy middle section. Just offhand, a question: Do you think the spirit of the evil princess will get loose? Anyone taking bets? The movie stretches out plot points that are inevitable, while failing to fill the wait time with anything imaginative or stirring.
This brings up the story’s second problem: For the first quarter of the film, Cruise is decisive. He is driving the action. But after a half hour or so, the story places our hero in a situation in which he can’t be resolute, can’t be sure and doesn’t ever know what to do. That might, in a description, sound interesting — the notion of an action star having to play doubt and confusion. But in practical terms, it means that “The Mummy” becomes sluggish.
As always, when the plot fails, there’s only one thing to do: Crank up the action. But action that doesn’t drive story, that has no plot action, is actually fake action — that is, commotion. So zombie/mummies attack and our hero has to fight them off. And then more zombie/mummies attack. And then, for a change, there’s a scene in which zombie/mummies attack. And all this is topped by an attack of the zombie/mummies, no top at all.
But wait. What about Russell Crowe? He’s easy to overlook, because he has so little to do. He plays Henry Jekyll, but a modern-day Jekyll who has turned his familiarity with the dark side into an obsession with containing evil. His best moment is when he refers to Nick as a younger man. Crowe is two years younger than Cruise.
Still, “The Mummy” is a close call. Cruise is easy to watch, and he gets warm, passionate support from Annabelle Wallis — indeed, she is as much the emotional locus as Cruise. And Sofia Boutella makes a demented and seductive, single-minded and scary evil princess. She looks like she could play Salome in some midcentury Biblical epic.
In the end, though, a close call isn’t enough. Movies do have an entrance fee, after all. “The Mummy” is the rare Cruise film that doesn’t quite give audiences their money’s worth.