The Mummy

Nick Morton is a thief, using his position in the U.S. Army to plunder ancient Middle Eastern sites for their priceless artifacts, so that he can sell them on the Black Market. This hunt accidentally unearths Ahmanet, an ancient Egyptian princess and Sorceress entombed under the desert for thousands of years for being really, really evil in Egypt. Now, Nick must work with a secret organization dedicated to containing the strange and supernatural horrors that threaten the world, so that he can stop Ahmanet from continuing her career as an evil Egyptian Princess and Sorceress, but this time… in London.

Starring Scientology’s Golden Boy Tom Cruise, as well as the voice of Peter B. Parker, Jake Johnson, plus Sofia Boutella, forever in search of a sci-fi/fantasy genre franchise that will both support her and be successful, and of course, your favorite and mine, the Master, the Commander, Russell Crowe, as both Dr. Henry Jekyll and his ever present shadow Mr. Hyde, the Nick Fury of the Dark Universe.

So, y’see, back in the 2010s, the success of the Avengers, as well as the resulting MCU, gave all of Hollywood a terminal case of the Shared Universe Fever, the effects of which we’re all still recovering from. With Marvel's unprecedented and continued success, of course Universal would join the rush to ride those coattails, and not only once again attempt to cash in on their coterie of Universal Monsters, but to also take a second bite at the apple that is the idea behind The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

Universal’s attempt at a shared universe was to be known as The Dark Universe.

It was going to be a series of films featuring Dracula, Van Helsing, Frankenstein’s Monster, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, the Mummy, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Invisible Man (and Woman), the Phantom of the Opera, on and on… and then link them all together somehow. With Tom Cruise as a lead, the Studio was full steam ahead with their newly conceived Mega-Franchise. They made a special logo for the start of the film, and unveiled a publicity photo of all the big name talent they had already signed on (which is one of the worst professionally photoshopped things ever done), and despite the fact that The Mummy was actually the second attempt to kick-start this franchise—the first being the forgotten failure of Dracula Untold three years earlier—they christened The Mummy in the press as the beginning of the Dark Universe and gave it a prime summer release date.

Big Plans. Big Dreams.

Everything changed with the near-immediate failure of The Mummy at the Box Office.

The whole thing was shelved. I imagine the Dark Universe Production Offices on the Universal Lot were a ghost town by that Monday. It probably didn’t help much that Johnny Depp was busy showing the world what a creepy little abusive scumbag he is, so his Invisible Man franchise was taken away and reworked into the smaller stand-alone horror that was released in 2020, and is actually good.

So, at least one good thing came out of the Dark Universe.

An Ill-conceived wet fart of a film, The Mummy is filled with plot strings heralding the coming of a massive project (that actually has a decent enough kernel of a central idea), all of it unfortunately hobbled by useless marketing bros and their deranged simpleton siblings, the Tech Bro financiers, an overlapping Venn Diagram of a group of people with low to zero value, who use their wealth for nothing else than to destroy what they don’t understand, which is everything, usually because they’re vindictive, petty, and jealous, but also because they believe they’re improving it, which to their smooth-brained idiot selves means reinventing the wheel over and over and over again, and then slapping a terrible new name on it.

But I digress…

To make a long story short (too late), I’m watching The Mummy now because, while I’ve always been really curious to see a true Mega-Franchise Killer; at the same time, I’ve never been willing to pay to see it. Today I discovered that it’s playing for “free” on Netflix.

So, in the film, our heroes unearth an ancient sarcophagus, and decide to take it with them, despite literally every dark omen or sign you could possibly think of doggedly begging them “Are you fucking stupid? What are you doing? Put that back, dummy!” Because guess what happens when the sarcophagus is opened?

Shit, meet Fan.

After that, the plot is basically… an incredibly old but still incredibly beautiful Mummy woman wants to make sweet, sweet love to the almost equally as ancient Tom Cruise, because their child will bring about the end of the world or something, turning Tom Cruise into an ageless god with the power of life and death, just like in real life, but her plans are thwarted, because her sacred dagger is broken, and they can’t stab each other if one of their daggers doesn’t work, so Mummy Woman needs Tom Cruise to run as fast as he can, and to jump off all sorts of things, all in order to reassemble the sacred dagger, so that Tom can turn that Mummy into a Mommy.

At an hour and fifty minutes, it feels really long. Also, I know it’s a bit of a cliche at this point to say that Tom Cruise and his female lead are anti-chemistry, but in this film it’s particularly true, Tom Cruise and his female lead are absolute anti-chemistry.

Plus, and maybe it’s just me, but during the film, whenever Tom Cruise and Jake Johnson are in a scene together, it’s hard to reconcile that they’re talking to Tom Cruise whenever they say “Nick” because that’s the name of Jack Johnson’s character on New Girl, which is a character that not only speaks to my soul on a regular basis, but also seems to be the only character that Jake Johnson ever really plays.

Anyway, long, boring, disjointed, and an all-around drag with no real spark, I do love the core idea here: A secret organization with the intent of controlling the secret world of gods and monsters, so it employs its own gods and monsters? That could be really fun. That idea is a big part of what originally drew me to comics like Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and the BPRD, but unfortunately, much like those franchises, it’s too bad the movies of the Dark Universe could not capture that promise.

Maybe next time.

(Yes, I don’t like the Hellboy movies, and I have no idea why you do either.)