Boutella isn't given a chance to be villainous and menacing. Part of the problem is that Ahmanet spends most of her time as either a corpse grasshopping about, steadily strolling through the streets of London - a mysterious sandstorm at her command - or as a prisoner with mercury being pumped into her veins. She's just another game piece in a larger end goal, predictably meeting her match via a convenient happenstance rather than our heroes being smarter. Also, the filmmakers try to distinguish their reboot from their predecessors by featuring a female mummy in Princess Ahmanet (a scene-stealing Sofia Boutella), yet the character never really seems to pose much of a serious threat. Hidden somewhere deep in the secret caverns of The Mummy hides the potential for a good movie, but what's unearthed here is a lumbering corpse that fails to even meander towards something exciting, despite all the boundless CG visual effects wizardry at its disposal. Then again, that reveal was frankly a let down and ultimately felt more like a teaser. In fact, there's more chemistry between the A-list actor and Crowe, who enthusiastically chews up the scenery during his transformation into Mr. Wallis struggles to create the tiniest spark when sharing screen time with Cruise. At least Johnson delivers a few wisecracks as a phantasmal rotting corpse haunting Nick. Instead, she serves as a potential love-interest and damsel-in-distress. The brunt of the leg work is given to Wallis as the only person who actually comes off intelligent but rarely given the chance to demonstrate it. Unfortunately, with Cruise being the main attraction, the rest of the cast is essentially a troupe of dancing marionettes - flat, two-dimensional, easily-forgotten characters providing little more than dialogue details for moving the plot along. Many of those moments, however, come opposite Johnson's performance or Wallis's timing while Cruise simply reacts.Īnd so, much of the plot centers on Cruise's Nick, which is none surprising, and his confused ego wrestling with the fact that monsters exist and the damage he seems to inadvertently inflict upon the world, leading to an unexpected if also somewhat unsatisfying character arc. Cruise plays Nick with his usual winning charm but is also allowed to be a bit of a clown. Chris Vail reminds him the price of his arrogance.
Jekyll puts him on check, Annabelle Wallis's archeologist Jenny Halsey hits him in the manhood and Jake Johnson's Cpl. He falls right into the role like a comfortable pair of worn pajamas, virtually sleepwalking his way through the production while Crowe's Dr. The character was practically tailor-made for Cruise, a familiar big-screen personality he's best at. Working under the guise of liberating rare and precious antiquities, the soldier is a smug and arrogant opportunist who fancies himself some kind of amateur archeologist and would probably call himself the real Indiana Jones if given the chance.
It's basically a flawed production due to a larger endgame in mind, but it comes with plenty of admirable bits sprinkled throughout, starting with Tom Cruise's role as treasure-hunter Sgt. In truth, the film is not as bad as word of mouth would lead one to believe. The production hastily moves from one conversation and action set piece to the next in order to achieve its goal within an allotted runtime. Heck, audiences aren't even allowed a moment to simply enjoy the visual spectacle decorating all 110 minutes of a resurrected Egyptian princess, still fuming after thousands of years over a perceived betrayal, wreaking havoc upon modern-day London. Following in the footsteps of the current superhero craze, the filmmakers impatiently cram this fantasy-adventure horror feature with so many details of future projects, a rushed desire to establish their classic monsters cinematic universe, that there seems little room for characterization. Before even going into the story proper, this first quarter of the movie immediately hints at the problems surrounding this installment to Universal Studios' first official attempt at creating a Dark Universe. In The Mummy, a reboot of the classic Universal Monsters franchise that spans several decades, the film opens with not one but two separate preludes: one with a burial ritual of a Templar knight and the other an exposition flashback with Russell Crowe doing his best British aristocrat voice-over.