Cruise’s freaky ‘Mummy’ exudes guilty-pleasure delight
Latest reincarnation of franchise is the 1st Dark Universe flick
The Mummy unwraps a surprisingly welcome gift for moviegoers: a film with Tom Cruise being unheroic for a change, a freaky-deaky breakthrough for Sofia Boutella and a satisfyingly nutso beginning to a grand monster revamp. Directed by Alex Kurtzman, The Mummy ( eeeE out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters nationwide Thursday night) is a tombfull of action-packed guilty pleasure that owns its horror, humor and rampant silliness equally. It also pays faithful homage to its previous namesakes: This Mummy shares a weird romantic bent with the 1932 Boris Karloff classic and is just as adventurous as the more recent Brendan Fraser vehicles, though with less of an Indiana Jones vibe and more in common with The Walking Dead and Shaun of the Dead.
Nick Morton (Cruise) and his buddy Chris Vail (Jake Johnson as the resident comic relief ) are American soldiers who steal rare antiquities while on missions and put them on the black market. After dealing with insurgents in Iraq, they accidentally unearth an underground prison of sorts housing a 5,000-year-old sarcophagus. Another interested party, archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), explains who’s in there: Ahmanet (Boutella), an Egyptian princess wiped from history after making an ambitious play to rule and also trying to conjure the god of death.
It’s all non-stop supernatural shenanigans from there, starting with their plane crashing in England and Nick dying in the aftermath. However, he gets up off the morgue table because he’s now cursed, as Ahmanet has chosen Nick as her vessel of ultimate evil, and she begins to amass an undead army of zombies. Cruise takes a break from his Jack Reacher and Mission: Impossible good guys to play a fullfledged antihero, and he wears the mantle well as a sexually selfobsessed, greedy jerk.
He’s the brawn but Boutella’s mummified villain is the real beauty, a stunning work of creature-feature art with hieroglyph- ics peppered all over her body. Birds, giant rats and beetles follow her wherever she goes, and Ahmanet doesn’t move like an ancient monster — rather, she saunters gracefully like she’s at Transylvanian Fashion Week.
The spectacle is a mixed bag: The creature stuff with Ahmanet and her minions is cool but certain things are a bit much, like the undead 12th-century English Crusaders who inexplicably are also Olympic-level swimmers. And Russell Crowe is a special effect of sorts, too, hamming it up as the stuffy Dr. Henry Jekyll.
The Mummy launches the Dark Universe franchise, a reboot of the iconic Universal monsters for whippersnappers who’ve never seen the classics, and Jekyll leads the Prodigium, an organization built to study and defeat monstrous threats, which serves as the connective thread of these movies. Smartly, they don’t overdo it with setting up more films: Johnny Depp doesn’t show up as the Invisible Man (though would we know?) but old-school horror fans might spot some familiar specimens in Jekyll’s laboratory.
Irreverently basking in a certain wacky glory, the new Mummy serves up a scary leading lady and enough bizarre situations to live up to its legendary title.