Cruise dances with undead in ‘Mummy’ – Film plotted like monster version of Marvel

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Of all the CGI-ed supernatural forces slung in Alex Kurtzman’s “The Mummy” (and, believe me, there are a lot), none can compete with the spectral spectacle of Tom Cruise, at 54.

He and his abs are almost creepily ageless. So it’s almost fitting that in one of the typically bonkers scenes in “The Mummy,” Cruise awakes naked and unscathed alongside cadavers in a morgue, where he bewilderedly removes the tag attached to his toe. Indefatigable and un-killable, Cruise really is the undead. He’s like the anti-Steve Buscemi.

Yet Cruise and “The Mummy” — the opening salvo in Universal’s bid to birth its “Dark Universe” monster movie franchise — are a poor fit, and not the good kind, like “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.” There’s plenty of standard, cocky Tom Cruise leading man stuff here: running, swimming, daredevil airplane acrobatics, more running. But his relentless forward momentum is sapped by the convoluted monster mishmash that engulfs “The Mummy,” a movie conceived and plotted like the monster version of Marvel. Increasingly, Cruise — like big-budget movies, themselves — is running in circles.

He plays Nick Morton, a roguish Army sergeant who plunders antiquities from Iraq with his partner Chris Vail (Jake Johnson). In a remote village they, along with archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), unearth a giant Egyptian tomb bathed in mercury. In it lies the Egyptian princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) who was mummified alive (imagine that wrapping job) after trying to unleash the evil Egyptian god of Set while killing her Pharaoh father, his second wife and the newborn baby that would deny her the throne. Naturally, she’s going to get loose.

Hers and other backstories are shown as “The Mummy” stumbles out of its grave, vainly trying to organize the story around two burial sites (the other is in London), the strange visions that begin plaguing Morton, and a quixotic (or merely capitalistic) gambit to stitch together a unifying principle for the Dark Universe. Mysterious apocalyptic happenings (a swarm of crows, a horde of rats, occasional ghouls) prompt a series of helter-skelter chase scenes that eventually lead Morton and Halsey to Prodigium, a stealth organization led by the dapper Dr Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe) that controls monstrous outbreaks, including those of its schizophrenic leader.

Prodigium would seem to be the connecting tissue for Universal’s shared universe, with plans for “Frankenstein,” ‘’The Invisible Man,” “The Creature From the Black Lagoon” and more in the works. Much of “The Mummy” hinges on Boutella’s vengeful and vaguely misogynistic monster (she for some reason needs a man — Morton, it turns out — to really do damage). But much of the film endeavors to set up the characters — maybe even famous phantoms — to come.

What the supposed value of having these movies “share” a universe is, I’m not sure. Movies aren’t sandboxes and the only time I remember enjoying a character connect films was Michael Keaton’s Ray Nicolette popping up in the Elmore Leonard adaptations “Out of Sight” and “Jackie Brown.”

Talented

Where these films could be fun, though, is seeing a talented star play a big, theatrical character that would honor the ghosts of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Javier Bardem and Johnny Depp are already lined up, so who knows? But the desperate need to graft them into a larger comic-book-like “world” — and a thinly conceived one, at that — suggests there won’t be much room for any actor to breathe.

For now we’re cursed with “The Mummy,” a messy and muddled product lacking even the carefree spirit of the Brendan Fraser “Mummy” trilogy. There are moments of humor in the script by David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, and Dylan Kussman, but Cruise isn’t the one (maybe Chris Pratt?) to pull off aloofly referring to the mummy as “the chick in the box.”

Almost to the degree that he was in “The Edge of Tomorrow,” Cruise is put through the ringer. A spiraling cargo plane spins him like laundry. He careens through a double-decker bus. His rib cage is yanked. Cruise remains, as ever, eminently game.

The new “Mummy,” you may be surprised to hear, doesn’t have a whole lot of show-stopping visual flimflam up its sleeve. Instead, it’s built around a chancy big trick.

The way her spirit merges with Nick’s remains a little vague, since it’s not as if Cruise turns into a frothing bad guy. He deals with the fact that he’s got evil inside him by treating it in a highly practical and energized fashion — as a problem to be solved.

All of which turns out to be a lot less fun than the stupid zappy “Mummy” movies of the ‘00s. It’s not as if this one is all that smart, what with a plot that somehow squashes together the First Dynasty of Egypt, the Crusades, and the looting of Iraqi antiquities. Yet it does seem to be trying for something, and so, if you’re a Cruise fan you roll with it. The flashes of Egyptian backstory are photographed (by Ben Seresin) with a yummy desert glow, and the Algerian actress Sofia Boutella, in black bangs and vertical rows of tattooed facial hieroglyphs, makes Ahmanet exotic in all the right ways, like something out of a Rihanna video. Then she shows up in contemporary London, along with Nick and Jenny Halsey (Wallis), the comely archeologist who Nick slept with and whose life he saved. Ahmanet is now a mottled, gray-skinned mummy who gains energy by putting civilians in a lip-lock and literally sucking the life out of them, which reduces them to skeletal zombies who exist to do her bidding.

It’s here that you begin to divine the film’s basic strategy: It will grab ideas, motifs, and effects from almost any genre and jam them together, palming off its grab-bag quality as “originality.” Scene for scene, “The Mummy” has been competently staged by director Alex Kurtzman, who has one previous feature to his credit (the minor 2012 Chris Pine heart-tugger “People Like Us”) and has never made a special-effects film before. He knows how to visualize a spectacular plane crash, or how to play up the Dagger of Set — a mystical weapon of death that needs a giant ruby to complete it — so that it doesn’t seem as chintzy as something out of a “National Treasure” movie (which is basically what it is). Yet competence isn’t the same thing as style or vision.

Russell Crowe, cultivating an air of pompous malevolence, shows up in the opening scene, but it isn’t until later that we learn he’s playing Dr Henry Jekyll — yes, that Henry Jekyll. Jekyll, it turns out, has to keep injecting his damaged hand with a regimen of drugs to avoid turning into Mr. Hyde, but watching all this the audience may be thinking: Whose bright idea was it to mix “The Mummy” with an entirely different formative horror story, as if the two could be cross-bred like some Famous Monsters of Filmland version of the Justice League?

The answer wouldn’t matter if “The Mummy” had the courage of its convictions … or the fun of its nonsense. But it falls right into a nether zone in between. The problem at its heart is that the reality of what the movie is — a Cruise vehicle — is at war with the material. (Agencies)

By Jake Coyle

This news has been read 4167 times!