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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SHAMELESS PLUG: If you enjoy my thoughts on cinema, you can also follow me on Letterboxd, where I post shorter-form reviews of a wider range of films.
