Mummy

You know what I like best about Golden Corral buffets, beside that the cooks almost always share their airline-size bottles of Fireball with me in the alley by the grease bins? I like that it’s all you can eat, and it’s all kinds of stuff, like limp, orange shrimp, desiccated fried chicken, grainy soft serve ice cream, gummy apple cobbler, and some shit called hush puppies that--they say--are not made out of dogs. Go ahead, email and ask them.

You know what I hate most about Golden Corral? That it’s all you can eat. Even though they offer foods in every shade of gray or brown it all starts to taste the same. An hour or so into a visit, it’s all just more shit shoveled down your gullet, and you keep going at first because you want to get your $9 worth, especially after how the cashier did not laugh at your funny joke. Later, you eat because you’re ashamed of yourself and can’t think of a better punishment than forcing down another Salisbury steak with its gristle catching between your molars and the lime jello trying to escape back up your esophagus.

It’s fucking gross. And you can’t remember why you ever came here in the first place.

The Mummy is like that sixth trip through the line at the Golden Corral. It’s way too God damn much of a terrible thing. This movie is a relentless barrage of same, grayish-brown slabs of Tom Cruise proving he’s a fucking man, proving he can take a punch or get thrown, dragged or dropped. Tom Cruise is the grade-D meatloaf of an action hero--serviceable and in abundance.

Universal Studios wants in on the “universe” thing like Star Wars and Marvel Comics have. They seek to build a long-ass gravy train, so they can keep burping up a little spittle of a movie with some legendary character and rake in the bucks. Lacking anything modern, though, they have had to go out to the graveyard so they can dig up and fuck the corpses of pedigreed monster movies like James Whale’s Frankenstein flicks, Dracula, The Werewolf, the Mummy all the way up through the Creature From the Black Lagoon. They call their new creation the “Dark Universe” where its monsters coexist in a string of hit movies that, I assume, will have monster-on-monster battles and then one final giant movie based on Boris Pickett’ song “Monster Mash.” It’ll be a graveyard smash.

The Mummy is the first flick in this new Dark Universe. Why start with The Mummy? Fuck if I know but I will guess convenience, not pride. If I were trying to attract people to something new I would start with the best I had. But this is like if Burger King had tried to launch a nationwide chain with the Shitburger. In reality, they waited a few years before they started making shitburgers. So Universal should have too, or if this is the best they have, they should kill the Dark Universe right now. More of this garbage is doing nobody a favor.

As any reasonable person might expect, The Mummy opens in twelfth-century England with crusading knights burying one of their own in London. I know, right? That’s how all Egyptian mummy movies should start. Please don’t take this corny opening with its Gregorian chants and dusty catacombs as a sign that this movie is going to go off the rails, or that it’s desperately scrambling for a convincing story. Why not? Because you don’t need signs. Every fucking moment of this turd is a storytelling disaster, a mega-million dollar mistake whose only faith is that some nerd with a computer can make it better in post-production.

The buried knight leads to a scene of modern day England where that ancient tomb is uncovered by a tunnel digger. The movie, still supposedly about a cursed Egyptian mummy, only gets more convoluted from there, moving to Iraq, and only to Egypt in cheesy flashback. Dr. Jeckyll (a lard-assed Russell Crowe) makes an appearance as the head of a well-funded scientific research center dedicated to “eradicating evil.” I assume he got his Phd. in evil eradication. It’s clear from his appearance that he will be the anchor of future Dark Universe movies, what with his steampunk lab and jars full of monster parts. That’s too bad, because he’s a fucking drag.

There are also knight-zombies, some who swim really well in their chain mail. I’m not sure why, but this movie is chock-a-block with nonsense, a smorgasbord of bad ideas executed with the utmost of noise and least most of imagination.

Tom Cruise is supposed to be the hero. He starts as an asshole, someone vaguely military in Iraq but not part of any battalion, and who is free to go out and rob ancient sites of their riches for his own benefit. He comes across as a low-rent, weirdly intense Alan Quartermain. While endangering himself and a comrade (Jake Johnson as comic relief, but without any jokes. And who later returns as a wisecracking zombie to tell Cruise where the go when the plot can’t), Cruise lucks upon an unknown ancient tomb where a very naughty Egyptian princess was buried. When the military hauls her sarcophagus out of the ground, all hell breaks loose. A woman (Annabelle Wallis), who considers herself a real archaeologist but cares not a whit about preserving relics, joins the mission and says sciencey things about how the sandstorm and flock of ravens that crash into a plane are signs of a curse.

Once the mummy gets loose the movie repeats itself ad nauseum: Tom Cruise runs either away from or toward the Mummy, only to have it hide, emerge and beat up Tom Cruise. But he’s so tough! The movie makes sure we understand he’s the God damn Timex watch of action heros. He keeps getting back up, just long enough for some perfunctory dialog, and then back to getting beat up. 

There is so little to care about in The Mummy. The action scenes have tons of special effects but feel like no fun at all. The characters are cardboard and stuffed full of nonsensical decisions driven more by trying to time the next punch Cruise will take than any human emotion. In the end, of course, Cruise saves mankind by killing the mummy, but is cursed and will forever walk the earth to find a cure for his bad case of mummism. 

Or until Universal pulls the plug on the Dark Universe. I hope to God that’s soon. Your money is better spent at the Golden Corral. A bad case of the runs is a better keepsake reminder than anything in The Mummy. One Finger.