It must have seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. Disney has their Marvel Cinematic Universe. Warner Bros. has its ever-improving DC Comics world. Universal didn’t want to left behind. Why not reboot their own Mummy franchise as the first installment in a new film series dubbed the “Dark Universe”? A pompous Russell Crowe even pops up here early on to deliver a lengthy prologue as Dr. Henry Jekyll. He gives us a little backstory as to how his character will fit into this new world they’re creating. Other classic Universal Studios monsters are expected to follow: the Bride of Frankenstein, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Invisible Man among others. Some major stars are being promoted for future installments. Johnny Depp has signed on to be the Invisible Man and Javier Bardem will be Frankenstein’s monster. The problem is to build a superior anthology of related films, it helps to start off with a bang. Sadly The Mummy is not great. It’s not even good.
The Mummy could have been silly fun but it gets bogged down in expository explanations of a superfluous narrative. The ancient history of the female mummy takes up a lot of time. And what is the plot exactly? Peel back all the corroborative details and it’s not much of a saga at all. Just the revenge of an ancient wanna-be Egyptian queen that unites a progression of attacks. The effects are enjoyable. I’ll give it that and Tom Cruise tries, really really hard. I give him an A for effort, but there’s not much here to sink your Friday night popcorn flick teeth into. It isn’t cheesy enough to be fun and it isn’t refined enough to be thrilling. Just a sequence of CGI encounters that have been stitched together one after the other for our hexed hero (and us the audience) to experience. In fact, I’ll save you some money right now. The Mummy is attack of the spiders, beetles, crows, rats, and zombies. The End. You’re welcome.
