“The Mummy”
Day 21 of the 2024 31-Days of Horror
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This version stars Tom Cruise as Nick Morton, a morally ambiguous soldier who also loots artifacts to from the countries he is stationed in. Yeah, not a great start. So apparently after seducing an archeologist, Jenny (Annabelle Wallis), Nick steals a “treasure map” from her and discovers an Egyptian tomb in Mesopetamia. He gets caught. Mistakes are made, and Nick unleashes the evil Ahmanet into an unsuspecting world.
Cruise is good at what he is good at. This isn’t it. I know I’ve watched this before, yet none of it is familiar to me. It was supposed to be the spring board for a series of connected movies, but… it really isn’t good. It’s pretty. There’s some super fun action sequences. But it’s just… meh.
What I’m most disappointed in is that Sofia Boutella, as Ahmanet, got 2nd billing. Almost everything good about this film was her talent and performance. There were a few other bright spots, including Russell Crowe’s performance as Jekyll/Hyde, but they were all teases to set up a new Universal Dark Universe. Which, unfortunately, crashed and burned like the Hindenburg due to the failure of this film. My opinion, Cruise was miscast. The studio, or whatever powers that be, wanted the name recognition and something more actiony, probably because Brendon Frazier did such an amazing job of horror/action hero back in the 90s. Cruise is not a horror guy. Nope. Just no. Full stop.
