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Pictured above is the best thing about this movie by far. Sofia Boutella playing Ahmanet. Honestly, that's all you really need to know about this venture, but I'll explain myself a bit more regardless.
The overall plot itself on paper is pretty damn solid. Bad girl princess reaches into the spiritual deep and starts playing with bad girl magic while committing atrocities. Egyptians get mad and lock her ass up. Many, many years later in modern times, she's woken up accidentally by Tom Cruise. She chooses Tom Cruise as her beloved to take over the world with. Simple. Good. I like it. And again, the actress playing Ahmanet was a damn good choice here, and her design, especially towards the end with her fully regenerated form with the tattoos is just... Perfection.
But now it's time to get into the problems... Thankfully, there actually aren't too many, but as good as Sofia playing Ahmanet is, it cannot hold this movie up alone. I mean, it definitely gets close, but the problems still drag it down. For starters... I don't know if I like Tom Cruise playing Nick Morton as the lead role here. Not that he can't act or anything, but it just doesn't seem the right role for him. I know that Hollywood wanted a really strong frontrunner, but Tom Cruise just really isn't a good fit here I feel. Brendan Fraser way back in 1999 was a very good choice by comparison.
Annabelle Wallis playing Jenny Halsey (Is this a Halo reference perchance?) sadly doesn't get enough development either, though there is a very nice aside where she talks to Ahmanet for a bit and we discover that she is incredibly curious about death and the afterlife. This really could have been something to color her character with way more than was done. Instead she spends almost ALL of the runtime playing catch-up with Nick. Lame. I feel sorry for the actress. Though Tom also gets shafted in the character department to be fair. I really would have liked him playing the trope of the dashing rogue character with a military background, but while Annabelle spends most of the runtime playing catch-up to Tom, Tom spends most of the runtime running away from Ahmanet (very ineffectively) and getting beaten up. Also lame.
Jake Johnson plays Sgt. Vail, and he is also unfortunately wasted. I could definitely see him playing the humorous foil to Tom's character, and we... Kinda sorta get that, but it just doesn't work well at all, at least as he's written here.
During the time he's actually alive, he's pretty alright, and I did like the twist that he was working with Ahmanet once he died, but that twist also wasn't very well executed, so it doesn't hit with the same gravitas as it would have if they had actually written it all properly.
Another problem is that this is supposed to be a reboot of The Mummy from 1999, but there's just... No sense of adventure here, ironically. And when the adventure is running short in your ADVENTURE MOVIE, that's a big problem. There's only a scarce sense of wonder and exploration like there was in the 1999 remake. Instead, we get studio execs trying to start a universe (They saw the Marvel Cinematic Universe and decided it would be a good idea to chase more trends.) by shoehorning in elements that just do nothing but drag the whole movie down, thus not only torpedoing the movie, but also ironically screwing themselves out of making a universe of any kind at all.
Now, let's take what we've learned here for a moment and imagine a movie that didn't have these problems. Imagine a movie with Ahmanet just as she is, but now with Tom Cruise as the dashing rogue, Annabelle Wallis as the gorgeous afterlife-addled scientist, and Jake Johnson riding shotgun as the trusty friend as they tromp through gorgeous desert ruins finding information about Ahmanet's life, power, and how to stop her. Seriously. It didn't have to get any more complicated than that, but nope. Ah well. This movie IS still pretty watchable. I don't think it's this huge trainwreck at all that some people would say it is, but it is definitely a huge missed opportunity.
Also, Set isn't the Egyptian god of Death. That would be Anubis. Apparently a 5-second Wikipedia search was too much for them.
