May we all hope for the apocalypse to keep this sort of movie from ever happening again.
Okay, the new Mummy film is about as fun as lighting your own home on fire only to find out you don’t have insurance. Just about every review of this movie focuses on the absolute ineptness of the narrative. The creators must have had some serious blackmail on Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe to get them to agree to work into this come-to-life pile of medical waste.
I get that a lot of you read these reviews to see me be snobbish and salty. Don’t get me wrong, I tried to will myself out of existence about halfway through this one. It is so bad that I would rather watch Monsturd with smell-o-vision. I would rather roll my head up in the car window than watch this movie again. I would rather be trapped in a phone booth with Tom Cruise after asking him to explain Scientology to me for eight hours than watch this again.
Yet, I don’t really feel like simply bashing this movie. It is so bad that there almost seems to be no point. It is so bad it defeated me. So, I thought I’d try something different: let’s think about why the film was so doomed from the start.
First and foremost, this iteration of the classic tale is not necessarily remake of Brendan Fraser’s much beloved film. No, this is based more on the much older films. Honestly, I have no problem with a revision of old monster films (I am not as anti-remake as a lot of folks are), and the early previews of this one made it look like it was a straight up horror film.
Before the initial reviews poured in, I was looking forward to this one. Cruise and Crowe are known more for dramas than action/comedies, so it made sense to me that there was going to be more of a horror vibe. The actual tale of the mummy is scary, and an actually scary monster film would be nice to see in theaters in my lifetime.
I knew something was amiss when I saw the second wave of previews that tried to amp up the comedic elements of the film. It is clear there was a tonal dispute or miscommunication somewhere along the line. I think this vibration between how the film is supposed to feel is in part what makes the acting seem so damn weird throughout the whole thing. Is Cruise supposed to be horrified or just kind of amused?
We end up with a film that was marketed as horror, shot as comedy, written like bad buddy action, and directed unevenly. Set designs and special effects range from well done to after school special. How did this happen? I genuinely want to know what the original vision was, because somewhere along the way something went horribly wrong.
Another issue with this film is that it is trying to spawn a franchise. If I have any request to the higher ups in Hollywood it is this: don’t plan the sequel before telling the original story. Dr. freaking Jekyll gets more screen time than the mummy in a movie called The Mummy. Think about that for a minute! Who gives a shit about a secret society, or Dr. Jekyll, or any of the other forced sequel bait crap they forced in? Just tell the story of the evil mummy come back to wreathe the world in darkness!
Bad movies happen. Something along the way just doesn’t work and the film suffers. Fine. Here we have a film that is not only bad, but drags down an entire franchise, and betrays the source material all at once. Instead of just a bad film, we get a look into the future of filmmaking. You see, we can’t have just one mummy movie, nah, we have to have a whole bunch of movies in the universe.
I can walk away from bad movies and shrug. This is one of those that makes me concerned for the future of filmmaking. Between this and the latest Kong, I think the monster genre may as well be pulled off life support at this point. 0/10
Jay Hates Movies 