The Mummy (2017)

THE MUMMY (2017)

Dir Alex Kurtzman

Screenplay by David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, Dylan Kussman, Story by Jon Spaihts, Alex Kurtzman, Jenny Lumet (uh oh)

Starring Tom Cruise, Annabelle Wallis, Sofia Boutella, Jake Johnson, Russell Crowe.

            Let us steel our nerves and consider, for a moment, THE MUMMY. No, not THE MUMMY (1911), nor THE MUMMY (1932) nor THE MUMMY (1959), nor THE MUMMY (1999), though you’d be forgiven some confusion. And in fact, I’d wager that confusion is not unintentional; every Mummy film ever made since the first one has been animated primarily by the cynical hope of coasting off the good name of another Mummy film and hoping that vague recognition alone will be enough to inspire good will in audiences. The whole concept is simulacrum made flesh (and then desiccated and mummified and revived years later believing that some British blonde is is the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian princess, but that’s neither here nor there).

But there has always been one fatal flaw in that logic: there is no “good name of another Mummy film.” And that’s because every single extant mummy film is terrible.* Even the “classic” 1932 Boris Karloff version is, let’s face it, even more boring than it is racist, and frankly has maintained its iconic standing more through association with its worthier peers in the Universal Monsters canon than through any inherent value in the film proper. The Mummy itself --all caps as a proper noun, for the concept is by this point an intrinsic part of the American cultural psyche far more than it is a reference to any specific artistic work-- may well have the singular distinction among the horror icons of achieving its lofty status without ever at any point actually being associated with a single film which was any damn good at all. It is, I have come to believe after an absolutely exhausting survey of Mummy fiction, a trope which has always owed its entire existence to hustling coattails-riding. It’s never been good, but somehow it did manage to become familiar, which in marketing terms is just about the same thing.

            With all that in mind, THE MUMMY (2017) starts to make a little more sense. But even still, only a little more sense. There is, I guess, a certain sadistic logic in making a new movie called THE MUMMY, in that it is, you know, a name people would sort of generally recognize and with which they might perhaps harbor vague positive associations without being able to explicitly name any concrete reason as to why. In fact, even its ostensible creators may have had a pretty hazy idea of what, exactly, there were supposed to be ripping off: it was originally billed as a “reboot of Universal’s ‘Mummy’ Franchise,” though whether that referred to Universal’s original 1932 Mummy series or Stephen Sommers’ 1999 series starring Brendan Fraser was never made clear, and may in fact never have been explicitly decided one way or another by any of the 60 or so people who manifestly had a controlling stake in what could generously be called the “creative process” here. It certainly hews closer to the latter’s mix of corny action beats and desperate comedy, but really resembles neither in any meaningful way except through the incidental presence of, you know, a The Mummy. Which, of course, is the sole reason for its existence in the first place; this was not a story told because someone had an idea for a story; it was a story told because someone had to write a story to justify the existence of that title. But if we must simply remake every single thing that has ever existed and wormed its way, however undeservedly, into the broader cultural consciousness, this was inevitable anyway and we might as well have gotten it out of the way in 2017 as any other time.

So sure, it all makes a kind of nihilistic sense, radiating a kind of soporific calculation so inescapable you can basically watch it unfold on-screen in real time. And yet, even knowing all that, even having written it all down in black and white, I still can’t quite overcome the unbelievable wrongheadedness of taking a classic horror icon and trying to fluff it into a huge-budget action franchise vehicle. I mean, how could anyone ever have thought this was going to work? To the extent that the Universal Monsters are known at all, it is as clearly and starkly as horror icons as anything fiction has ever produced. What in the world would make anyone think they would (or should!) have any salience outside that context? I get why Universal Studios would want them to (money), but even at that most cynical, mercenary level, surely someone had to see that this was hopeless. I can see why they’d want to sell it, but who in the world did they imagine would actually want to buy it?

 Let’s just say what we mean here: this 2017 movie currently enjoying our critical attention exists thoroughly and unreservedly to fulfill some Universal executive’s dream of having a popular shared-universe franchise (embarrassingly branded the “Dark Universe”) just like Disney has with Marvel. And since Universal didn’t buy superheroes, they’re banking on their stable of classic monster movies to generate the distasteful but unavoidable “content” necessary for there to be a universe to share. This is the goal --the entire motivating force behind the existence of THE MUMMY (2017)-- and the marketing guys have sunk their teeth into this plan and aren’t gonna let it go til it ain’t moving.

But the thing is, nobody except Universal executives and their associated marketing teams have ever showed the slightest bit of interest. They keep starting this thing, failing spectacularly to find an audience, abandoning it in disorganized, humiliating defeat, and then inexplicably starting over (the 2004 VAN HELSING debacle, the 2010 WOLFMAN debacle, the 2014 DRACULA UNTOLD debacle, and now this too died at the box office). But no matter how often it fizzles, they can’t seem to accept that the problem is in the fundamental idea. All the money in the world can’t convince people that they want something which has no practical reason to exist.** Just because something enjoys a wide name-recognition among the lucrative 18-34 demographic doesn’t mean you can utterly upend its context and still maintain its original power, no matter how much you might wish otherwise. And I just can’t imagine any sane writer or director feels otherwise. Nobody had a burning passion to make this movie any more than anyone had a burning passion to see it. But in order for it to be marketed, it had to be made, so here is it. All Hollywood movies are made for crass commercial reason, of course, but it’s rare indeed to find so many resources being spent to craft a work of art entirely at the behest of the marketing department.

Well, and at the behest of Tom Cruise, the only marquee brand here whose name is not THE MUMMY. In the wake of the movie’s failure, people seem to have been eager to shift the blame to the actor, who supposedly exerted a huge amount of control over the finished product, from re-writing the script to supervising the editing. And that seems like a pretty plausible theory; It’s not at all hard to see some very distinct parallels with the star’s recent MISSION IMPOSSIBLE and JACK REACHER pictures and their similarly relentless march of globetrotting nonsense stringing together a parade of mostly-practical stunt-work setpieces. This sort of wham-bang blockbuster cinema is laughably out of place in a movie about a Mummy, of course, with its very best sequence (a legitimately cool uncut take of Cruise and a bunch of stunt-people tossed around weightless --for real!-- in a crashing plane) having almost nothing to do with the title character at all. But even if you want to blame the entirety of the film’s misplaced action-movie ambitions on Cruise, he’d still only be responsible for one of the three or four completely unrelated movies vying for supremacy during the film’s unexpectedly demure 110-minute runtime (practically a short film by the standards of modern blockbusters). And it’s by no means the worst of them.

Those four unrelated movies are as follows, in descending order of tolerability: A mummy movie, an action vehicle, a prequel to a mummy movie, and a labored franchise-servicing purgatory starring Russell Crowe. All are bad in their own way, of course, but some are rather more exotically dismal than others. In the first of these movies, a couple of incessantly quipping mooks --Cruise (AUSTIN POWERS IN GOLDMEMBER), Annabelle Wallis (ANNABELLE [and niece of Richard Harris!]) and Jake Johnson (that smarmy millenial fuck-o from JURASSIC WORLD***) find a --hey! what have we here?-- mummy’s tomb [!] due to some sort of convoluted horseshit about the US military in Iraq,**** and get themselves cursed in the process. Standard mummy stuff, but made tolerable by its likable cast, by-the-book plotting, and surprising deftness for horror staging. You’ll notice, in fact, that this simple premise would be comfortably sufficient to fill out an entire movie. But this is a big studio blockbuster in the year of our Lord 2017, so “enough” is, of course, never enough until it’s “far too much.” And thus we get three additional movies competing with the only one which has any real legitimate reason to exist.

 The second movie is some kind of setpiece blockbuster doggedly committed to hurling frantic stunt sequences at us every now and again, and mostly indifferent to the fact that it’s about a The Mummy or whatever. These sequences are pretty middling by Crusie’s usual standards, but the plane crash bit is a winner, and there’s even a rambling chase sequence that occasionally remembers that it’s in a horror movie and uses its mammoth budget to give us some enjoyable zombie mayhem which you could never get in a movie with a normal zombie budget, so not a total wash. Third, we have, intermittently, the story and --ominously, as longtime Mummywatchers are all too aware-- the backstory of the title character (Sofia Boutella, CLIMAX). Supposedly this was once a more prominent part of the movie, as in the final product Boutella has almost nothing to do but stand around looking menacing and flash back to the origins of her Mummying in a rather wearying repetitive manner. Here we might actually be able to thank Cruise for jealously excising his co-star’s tiresome life story from the final cut, because this is, of course, utterly dire stuff. Still, it’s a venerable and --more to the point-- inescapable part of the basic Mummy movie boilerplate, so we could hardly be surprised that it remains, even in the year 2017, an inconvenience that veteran connoisseurs of mummy fiction expect and resign themselves to endure.

The final movie, though, is something wholly unexpected. This is because, crudely sutured into this thoroughly quotidian paint-by-numbers Mummy Movie yarn, we find something exponentially weirder, a subplot about a secret society of monster hunters which feels like the jarring intrusion of a completely separate movie, because that’s in fact what it is: the covetous tendrils of the “Dark Universe” creeping their way into a unambitious self-contained little thriller to force the world, against its better judgement, to acknowledge the existence of a shared universe which does not, by God, actually exist yet, and may never exist. And thus it is that before we meet a single character who will actually be germaine to this particular tale, we encounter one Dr. Henry Jekyll***** (Russell Crowe, NOAH) owner and operator of a monster-hunting franchise called “Prodigium” which appears to be quite a lucrative venture judging from their expansive, well-appointed headquarters with enough jumpsuit-sporting henchmen and technological goo-gahs to handily pass for a Bond Villain’s lair.

Crowe is, for whatever reason (possibly alcohol-related), obviously having a ball hamming up a performance which consists wholly and without exception of tedious exposition, most of it necessary only to explain his own incongruous presence in this mummy movie. He’s clearly decided that the only possible means of survival is to turn the thing into some kind of high camp parody of a terribly-written exposition-spewing non-character crammed into a movie that has neither need or space for him, entirely in a labored effort towards servicing a franchise which may never actually exist. But while this is obviously the correct approach, and does something to render this little sub-movie slightly short of instantly lethal, everything about this plotline is useless and burdensome and completely stops the movie dead in its tracks, efficiently euthanizing any lingering bits of momentum that might have been building up while the creative team wasn’t paying attention. Without it, THE MUMMY 2017 would simply be unfocused mediocrity; with it, it becomes something closer to a genuine boondoggle, something which will seem absolutely confounding to a hypothetical future audience who does not have the proper context to understand why there’s a 30-minute teaser commercial for a non-existent franchise jammed into the back half of an otherwise stock mummy flick.

In a way, a spectacular disaster is a more interesting thing to have in the world than a middling studio flick too unimaginative to embarrass itself in any noteworthy way, which passes unremarked upon through cinemas and promptly vanishes from human memory. But you know, there are moments -- and only moments, to be sure-- where one wonders if perhaps “middling mediocrity” and “staggering folly” weren’t the only two possible outcomes here, if there wasn’t an actual good movie to be found here, if only someone had stopped to notice it. Those moments have little to do with Tom Cruise stunts --which are found in profusion, and in rather more colorful array, in other movies better suited to their charms-- and are certainly never found in the enervating mummy backstory or even in the disposable clutter or the basic plot. Where they are found is the only real surprise in the whole film, because they turn up in the one place the movie seems least interested: its mostly-forgotten origins as a horror movie.

For whatever reason (craftsman’s pride, perhaps, or simple boredom, but surely not a deep sense of belief in the project’s artistic merit) “creature designer” Mark 'Crash' McCreery (JURASSIC PARK, LADY IN THE WATER) actually designed some pretty great-looking reanimated corpses which make full use of the film’s indefensible budget to offer us a range of impossible herky-jerky movements and imaginative demises that are simply out of reach for horror films that don’t employ an army of visual effects artists. I also very much like the double-iris eyes which makes for the film's most striking visual. Most important, though, THE MUMMY 2017 offers something that almost no other Mummy film has so far been able to convincingly produce: a skinny, desiccated, unwrapped mummy lurching around on brittle bones like a malevolent spider on the hunt. It looks, in other words, like a genuine mummified corpse, not like some beefy guy wrapped in toilet paper, a distinction which lends it an unexpected visual potency despite its familiarity.

 The image of a spindly, half-skeletal ghoul has actually been part of Mummy fiction for quite some time; Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1892 gothic classic Lot No. 249 --which comprises, along with Bram Stoker’s 1903 Jewel Of The Seven Stars, the baseline popular origin of the genre******-- describes just such a creature, which would have, in fact, likely been more familiar to the Victorian Egyptophiles of his time (who delighted in “mummy unwrapping parties” -- a pass-time only slightly less morbid than today's "unboxing videos" ) than the bandage-swaddled version which has since become the standard iteration of the concept (and certainly saw its high-water mark with Christopher Lee’s imposingly buffness in Hammer’s 1959 THE MUMMY). McCreery, cinematographer Ben Seresin (PAIN AND GAIN) and director Alex Kurtzman (first-time director,******* but long-time bane of screenwriting as part of the dreaded Orci/Kurtzman duo) make the most of the exotic design by highlighting its boney, impossible movements against --why, what have we here?-- gothic swirling mists in an old abandoned churchyard! Holy shit, it’s almost like this was the correct context for a century-old horror icon all along! Who woulda thunk it?

It’s a trivial thing, of course, in the face of so very much howling sound and fury signifying nothing, but it’s also a frustrating glimpse of the simple pleasures which were right at the filmmakers’ fingertips, had they bothered to notice them. For all the miserable, inept mummy movies that have been made (and they’re all miserable an inept), there is something about this concept that has continued to stir the imagination of generations of horror fans. At a particularly low point in my journey through mummy fiction, I lamented that a mummy is basically just a solitary zombie that can’t bite you, and maybe we ought to admit it simply isn’t a cinematic concept worthy of much more exploration. But that’s not really true; or anyway, not entirely true, though it’s certainly a fitting complaint for virtually every single iteration of the concept I’ve ever seen on screen.

Fundamentally, a reanimated mummy should (or could, at least) have a little more resonance than that. A mummy doesn’t just traffic in our discomfort with dead bodies and the appalling wrongness of their return to some sort of unnatural half-life (though of course it does this too, and with a unique tactile quality perhaps better embodied in this movie than any other, of a body not rotting or mutilated, but rather desiccated, drained of its vital fluids in an uncanny parody of preserving vitality). More than our fear of dead things, it traffics in an almost Lovecraftian sense of unknowable antiquity reaching into the present in unanticipated, incomprehensible ways.******** Very nearly 200 years after Jane C. Loudoun published The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (the earliest tale of a reanimated mummy that I can identify) our knowledge of the ancient Egyptian culture has grown exponentially, but it still maintains its ability to mystify and intrigue us, as evidenced by its integral place in the essential folklore of our time, from conspiracy theories to ancient alien hypotheses. For all our technological progress, we are still awed and humbled by the scale and permanence of what they achieved, and the level of sophistication they reached literally thousands of years before our time.

A mummy, then, is less a metaphor for our fears of death and loss of personal identity than it is a cultural avatar from a forgotten past, challenging our smug certainty that we are the unquestioned masters of creation. In a chapter of Jewel Of The Seven Stars which he deleted from subsequent editions, Stoker actually makes this point explicit: if, in fact, the central mummy succeeds in using the unknown magic of antiquity to revive itself, the staunch Englishmen don’t just lose a battle, they lose their very sense of identity. Their belief in the essential correctness of their culture, religion, and basic understanding of the mechanics of the universe, get swept away into a terrifying chaos of uncertainty. This, I think, is the key to The Mummy’s persistence as a iconic figure despite a century of dull film iterations; at its core, the Mummy symbolically challenges not only the frailty of human life, but the fragility and vulnerability of our most fundamental assumptions about ourselves and the world. It is an alien, an other, emerging from a world out of time, a world utterly unfamiliar and remote but so manifestly remarkable that its very existence is a challenge to our innate sense of superiority. If the mummy bests us, we’re not just in physical danger, we’re existentially at risk of being forced to relinquish our place as the arbiter of civilization to its rightful heir.

All this was right there for the makers of this film, which had every conceivable resource to realize these themes if any film ever put to (digital) celluloid could ever be so described. And the most infuriating thing is that the ingredients are all unmistakably there; the film has a great sense of the disturbing corporeal wrongness of the mummy’s reanimated remains (when the filmmakers bother to try for it), and even adopts Stoker’s essential structure of a possession tale, personalizing the basic metaphor of culture being supplanted by the malevolent manifestation of the ancient primordial past. Hell, it even goes one step further and adds the unnecessary but intriguing detail that this is the product of imperial overreach: for the Victorian and Edwardian Brits presiding over an uneasy globe-straddling empire, anxieties that the “natives are restless” found outlets in the “Imperial Gothic” tales of the time which provided the fertile soil from which sprung the origins of mummy fiction. But in 2017’s THE MUMMY, we find the inciting incident to be the product of a different type of colonizer: a US soldier looting native treasures in American-occupied Iraq. It’s almost enough to tempt one to wonder if someone here, writing some far-removed early version of the script from which these tiny vestigial details were retained even absent their original significance --as a dozen more writers brazenly re-shaped the tortured mass into new and ever more contorted convolutions-- knew what they were doing. But probably they just happened to blindly snare a couple key ideas in their brute trawl of every possible cliche their predecessors had yet devised.*********

So it has the right ingredients to actually make something of its premise, though hopelessly mixed into a haphazard, overflowing pile of unrelated and contradictory detritus. As I have admonished so many times in the past, however, ingredients are not a meal. And it will come as no surprise to you that despite these potentially salient elements being present at various points in the plot, the movie makes absolutely not the slightest thing of any of them.The uniqueness and majesty of Ancient Egypt, in particular, is woefully neglected; though we do get some requisite flashbacks, the Egypt our antagonist occupies is a bland, undefined space, filled mostly with medium-sized candle-lit rooms which are furnished almost exclusively with billowing curtains (which actually seems like kind of a fire hazard, but I guess you worry a lot less about that in houses built of giant limestone and granite slabs). With the exception of name-checking notorious Egyptian heel-god Set (sometimes also called Seth), “Princess Ahmanet” might as well be a villainous witch from any time and place in history, or, perhaps more likely, from no specific time and place at all. And if it can’t even be bothered to engage with the one essential element of its own basic premise, you can hardly expect it to do any better with the more tangential elements: The film abandons its promising horror imagery almost as quickly as it stumbles upon it, and shrinks away from its provocative Iraqi war elements with a pronounced discomfort which is almost palpable.   

Which is, I realize, not telling you anything you don’t already know. 2017’s THE MUMMY is dumb and bad, just like all mummy movies are dumb and bad, which was already so obvious to you that you’ve never even considered seeing this piece of crap and have only read this far into this review in the vain hopes of trying to understand why I would so unwisely do so. And yes, it’s dumb and bad. But I’m sorry to say you’re going to have to see it anyway, and I’ll tell you why: for reasons too pointless to get into, the action eventually moves to a secret crypt hidden under London’s subway system, where the bodies of returned crusaders have been interred. And what does the Mummy do when she arrives? Why, raises the departed knights from their tomb, of course. And just like her, they’re ancient, eyeless, desiccated corpses still wearing the symbols of the ancient Templar order to which they belonged. You see where I’m going with this? Undead, eyeless Templars! This is basically the fifth BLIND DEAD movie!********** And at one point Tom Cruise punches one of them and gets his hand stuck in his ribcage! So it’s not all bad news. In fact, compared with the rest of the BLIND DEAD movies, this is probably one of the two or three best! As both reanimated mummies and the filmmakers behind the venerably lowbrow subgrene of Mummy fiction almost always eventually discover, context really is everything.

                                                                                   

                                                                                    FIN

* THE MUMMY (1911), being a lost film and therefore unseen my me, is a possible exception, though the plot synopsis does not exactly inspire confidence.

**  Or anyway, can’t always do it; that the BEAUTY AND THE BEAST remake from 2017 grossed over a billion dollars provides ample evidence that it certainly can be done, and also also as a bonus definitively proves that there is no God and we live in a cold, indifferent amoral universe where ‘justice’ and ‘right’ are empty, meaningless abstractions which crumble like dry leaves before the might of Lord C’thulhu.

*** He did play “Jesus Christ” in A VERY HAROLD AND KUMAR 3D CHRISTMAS, though, so I can’t be too mad at him.

**** A weirdly tone-deaf plot device by any metric, and made even weirder by its absolute needlessness and total irrelevance to the rest of the so-called story.

***** Dr. Jekyll, of course, was never part of the Universal Horror canon (there was a 1931 Paramount version with Fredric March and a 1941 MGM version with Spencer Tracy) though, as with VAN HELSING, Universal Executives seem absolutely convinced to the contrary. Perhaps they’re getting confused by the existence of 1953’s ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, as near as I can tell the only classic Universal production to ever include the character? But if meeting Abbott and Costello is all it takes to be considered a iconic Universal Monster, the Keystone Kops may also turn up in the “Dark Universe.”

****** Of course, we can trace the lineage back further than that, as I intend to do in my forthcoming book-length A Cultural Anthropology of the Mummy. But for today’s purposes, I think it’s fair to call those two stories the basis of the modern conception of “The Mummy” as a distinct boogeyman of the horror genre. (Bonus trivia: Louisa May Alcott, of Little Women fame, wrote a very early “Mummy’s Curse” story called Lost in a Pyramid; or, The Mummy's Curse in 1869, decades before either Doyle or Stoker. It does not, however, feature a resurrected, ambulatory mummy seeking revenge)

******* And why not hire a first-time director for a huge franchise-inaugurating iteration of an iconic screen classic with a budget of $200 million?

******** Indeed, Lovecraft himself wrote (or co-wrote/ghost-wrote, with Hazel Heald) a mummy story of his own: 1935’s Out of the Aeons. Of course, Lovecraft was racist enough that he damn sure wasn’t going to situate a great lost civilization in Africa, so it’s a mummy from the lost continent of Mu. But we know damn well where mummies come from, Howard. UPDATE: As commenter Matthew points out, Lovecraft too knew where mummies come from; early in his career, he ghostwrote a story called Imprisoned With The Pharaohs (1924) for none other than Harry Houdini.

********* A quest which also snared, I might add, some decidedly non-mummy related fiction; how else do we explain the brazen daylight robbery of several specific plot elements and even scenes from AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON? Did one of the writers misread the memo and start watching werewolf movies before someone corrected him about the genre he was supposed to be ripping off?

********** Or sixth, if you want to count the other unofficial BLIND DEAD sequel, John Gilling’s 1975 La cruz del diablo.***********

*********** By the way, I want to point out that that tenth footnote marks a decisive record for most ever footnotes on a single piece I’ve written! Thanks, THE MUMMY!

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