Tom Cruise's 'The Mummy' is an Embarrassing Relic of Cinematic Universe Fever

The massive success of Marvel Studios' output in the 2010s is one of those things that fundamentally shifted the film industry for the worse. We're all so familiar with it now, but you have to remember that "The Avengers" was seen as one of the great Hollywood gambles back in 2012, with their five-film lead-up paying off tremendously. Serialized storytelling could thrive by way of the cinematic universe, in which multiple films would share characters, running stories and a standard visual language. As is the case with chasing trends, so many franchises wanted to ride that wave of success without understanding what made it work to begin with. The Marvel movies (for a while, at least) could largely stand on their own as individual films that left the door open for further expansion in post-credits scenes teeing up the next installment. But some studios were in such a rush to play catch up that it ultimately led to their cinematic universes crashing and burning before they could even get started; none fell on their face quite as hard as the Dark Universe. Years before the name would find a fitting home within the theme park, the Dark Universe was Universal's attempt at building their own interconnected series of films by way of their classic monsters. It didn't seem like a completely bad idea at the time. After all, Universal had already proven its success throughout the '30s and '40s with individual films for "Dracula," "Frankenstein" and the "Wolfman" (among others) before having them share the screen in movies like "Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman" or "House of Dracula." The difference is that these projects came about naturally rather than through some pre-ordained master plan that could be disrupted with the success of a few bad films, which is precisely the trap the Dark Universe fell into. Universal cashed all its chips on Alex Kurtzman's "The Mummy," a film that somehow managed to be an even greater disaster. "The Mummy" was doomed from the start, and I do mean right from the very beginning. After the Universal logo does its traditional fanfare, we suddenly see this corny Dark Universe logo on the other side of the globe. It's not a great start when the audience audibly groans before they've seen a lick of footage. But what about the actual film? Well, for a movie called "The Mummy," it takes a bit before we get to the actual story, as we're treated to the discovery of a bunch of Crusader knights buried underneath London. They're protecting a jewel with unspeakable power that could prove dangerous if placed in the wrong hands. Stop me if you've heard this yarn before. Our titular mummy is Princess Ahmanet (Sofia Butella), a strong-willed successor set to be next in line for the throne of Pharoah. But when his son, Ahmanet is none too happy— going so far as to establish a connection with Set, the God of Death. It turns out conjuring a demonic entity to help you slaughter your family to achieve great power is a no-no that results in mummification. Centuries later, we arrive in a terrible buddy action comedy with Army Staff Sgt. Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) and his best friend Chris (Jake Johnson) evading gunfire in Iraq. With their bacon saved by a routine series of American air strikes, they meet up with Jenny (Annabelle Wallis), a British archeologist who leads the pair into an open abyss containing Ahmanet's mercury-pooled remains. Upon bringing the deeply cursed sarcophagus onto a cargo plane, things get very bad very fast, with the transport vehicle crashing into the ground with Nick still inside. It's not too much longer before the explorer realizes he's not only technically dead, but shares a psychic connection with Ahmanet. If it feels like I'm throwing a lot at you, it plays even worse in the film itself. "The Mummy" is edited like a shameless trailer trying to masquerade as a movie. Dialogue is spoken with the cadence of it being potentially used in the marketing material and (shocker) a lot of it was. The result is a film without an identity beyond its ability to drum interest in future adventures with the monsters. In Kurtzman's film, Cruise takes center stage in a woefully miscast role as an adventurous scoundrel type who doesn't think before he makes decisions that get people killed. He looks so lost in scenes where he isn't running or performing some kind of stunt. Located underneath the Natural History Museum in London is S.H.I.E.L.D., errr, I mean, Prodigium, a secret organization dedicated to fighting and understanding the monsters that live in our world. Just in case you weren't sure what these people study, we're witness to Nick staring down artifacts such as the Gill Man's hand, in addition to the skull of a vampire who may or may not be Drac. The big cheese is none other than another classic monster (albeit not a Universal one) in Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe). Does he turn into the other guy? You bet he does, and with a terrifically funny cockney accent to boot. It's to Crowe's credit, however, that he's giving the most spirited performance of the bunch outside of Butella. Stephen Sommers' "The Mummy" delighted audiences with a deft blend of action, horror, and screwball comedy that never compromised the other. It's the complete opposite case with Kurtzman's reboot, which can't seem to pick a lane. It's far from scary; the action is subpar at best; and the romance between Cruise and Wallis is about as alive as a rotting corpse. The film is trapped in this perpetual state of exposition that doesn't make a whole lot of sense within its own world. With "Lee Cronin's The Mummy" coming to theaters next weekend, I'd been curious to revisit the 2017 film to see if it was exactly as bad as I had remembered. While it's certainly still the same kind of awful, it's already aged as an embarrassing relic of the cinematic fever I was talking about earlier. Kurtzman's "Mummy" can't commit to any of its potential tragic finales. It's worth checking out if only to see how a film can become a trainwreck when you put the cart before the horse. Or if you don't have the time, you can get the Kurtzman "Mummy" experience with a trailer that the IMAX folks accidentally uploaded at the end of 2016 with some audio channels missing. It's the hysterical legacy something this bafflingly misguided deserves. "The Mummy" is currently streaming on HBO Max.