I'm surprised it has taken this long for Tom Cruise to tank an otherwise decent film. His Scientology-related controversies haven't been followed by any big film failures—far from it, considering that he has multiple decent Mission: Impossible and Jack Reacher films under his belt at this point.

So I went into his reboot of The Mummy hoping Cruise would continue his surprising streak of floating atop incredible action setpieces and delightful ensemble casts. Not so much. In fact, Cruise is the primary reason this first entry in the Dark Universe stinks, and he drags an otherwise fine-to-solid film down to his underwhelming level.

Hangin’ at The Max





















Cruise's smartest move in recent years has been to pass the "characters with actual personality" buck to castmates, but The Mummy doesn't afford him this luxury. Cruise stars as Nathan Drake—er, I mean, Nick Morton, a globe-trotting, double-crossing treasure hunter. (His opening-scene wardrobe looks literally lifted from the cover of Uncharted 3.) Before any monsters appear, we learn that Nick has stolen a map leading to supposedly epic treasure in Iraq. He starts the film assuring his fellow thief-in-arms Chris (Jake Johnson of New Girl fame) that this mission will be a cinch.

Everything goes haywire when a close-to-offensive band of hooded Iraqi insurgents opens fire. Immediately, the promise of a weasel-outta-trouble Cruise falls apart. His character Nick completely fails to come across as sneaky, crafty, or charming. The brief gunfight is only a few minutes, which is nearly tripled by the overlong toddler-shouting match Nick and Chris get into afterward. This reduces Chris to a one-dimensional shout-very-loud companion, and Cruise's acting chops only go so far as shrugging in response.

The shootout ends with the thieves somehow calling in a US military airstrike because they're ex-military but still somehow have a walkie-talkie line on a sweet missile launch site? (I'm still unclear on the logic of that one.) The victim of their theft, an archaeologist named Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), says Nick slept with her recently and stole her very important map. This outburst is as close as the movie comes to any on-screen chemistry between two characters, and the duo proceeds to argue for far too long about how long their sex lasted.

A different actor might have used this brief span of character-development time to convince the audience that they could waltz into any place—a bedroom, an Iraqi compound, a military-leader argument—and get what they want. But Cruise looks completely out of his element trying to do so. By the end of the film, I guessed Cruise's method-acting tactic: watching enough Saved by the Bell to pull off a Zack Morris imitation. Cruise spends most of the film smirking, shrugging, and looking quizzically at every situation he walks into, with occasional smart-ass quips that fall flat. ("We are not looters. We are liberators of antiquities.") Wallis is similarly flat, though that might be because her character Jenny was written to do nothing more than react to Nick, either with loathing or logically unsound adoration.

Great VFX, solid Crowe

There are good parts to the film, and they almost all revolve around the incredible VFX work fueling the zombie-ish armies that the titular mummy (Sofia Boutella) conjures. Whenever evil is about to strike, the film delights in big-budget horror-movie camp, including dramatic orchestral swells, creepy sound effects, and harsh zooms on the obvious soon-to-be victims. Then the monsters arise, all rendered with tremendously dilapidated body parts, withering skin, and terrifying faces (with glossy, creepy rats and insects all around, for good measure). I found humor and excitement in these moments when The Mummy really owns its status as a capital-M Monster Movie. In one of my favorite scenes, Nick swims away from an army of more than a dozen not-slow-at-all zombies, their delicate deformations shimmering in the underwater light.

An intoxicatingly rendered mess of bandages and falling skin appear all over Boutella as well, but more importantly, the film's VFX team strikes the right balance between making her look spooky and letting her impeccable monster-movie performance shine through. Boutella nails her role and successfully alternates between seductive and destructive, whether screaming in ancient Egyptian or cooing in English.

Russell Crowe manages to turn in a mighty good, if brief, performance of his own as Dr. Jekyll (and, spoiler alert, perhaps one other character). This might surprise anyone who hears him narrate the dorky opening story about the primary mummy's origins, but he's all dry wit and rapid-fire delivery as the leader of a mysterious international collective with a mission to study the world's ancient monsters.

But too much of The Mummy focuses on Nick and Jenny's mission to take down the monster as opposed to having fun with the film's dark and spooky parts. That means far too much time is spent explaining plot points—even as the film simultaneously takes some of the biggest logical leaps I've seen at a theater in years. Viewers are told, over and over, that Nick is cursed by this mummy, and we see her magically appear around and behind him in spooky fashion, yet he always seems to slip away. And Dr. Jekyll has an ironclad system designed to subdue his darkest side.. yet this conveniently falls apart just as we meet him.

More like the Dumb Universe

The biggest logical leap is that any character in this film would be successful or powerful enough to get to where they are in this film. They all squabble over petty matters and stumble into success rather than earn it. I rooted for Boutella's evil character—but the filmmakers didn't give that angle any good payoff for monster-movie lovers. Too much Nick and Jenny.

Universal Studios is obviously moving forward with this cockamamie "Dark Universe" thing, but do the good parts of The Mummy bode well for the eventual follow-up? Some scenes make me believe that a crew of diehard monster movie fanatics was at work here—but someone in the production crew also thought repeated sequences of people staring at each other longingly in the desert was a good idea. (Roughly five moments in The Mummy feel like rejected perfume ads.)

Put your blinders on for this Dark Universe.