In his decades-long career, Tom Cruise has appeared in plenty of star vehicles, but never anything quite like what he finds himself in with The Mummy. We’ve become accustomed to the sort of film the 54-year-old actor prefers—action flicks that allow him to run with great zest while performing harrowing stunts with boundless intensity—but Universal’s attempt to kick-start a movie-monster cinematic universe puts Cruise in an unusual (and unflattering) position. Whereas he’s usually the main attraction, in The Mummy it’s the franchise-building, the special effects and the mummy herself that are the real stars. As a commentary on the modern blockbuster, the movie’s fascinating. But as an actual movie, it’s fairly disheartening.
In its portentous opening, the film explains that the ancient Egyptian princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), feeling betrayed that she will not inherit her father’s kingdom because she’s a woman, unleashed an evil force across the land, her punishment to be mummified and buried alive. Cut to contemporary Iraq, where roguish soldier of fortune Nick Morton (Cruise) and his equally roguish, wise-cracking partner Chris Vail (Jake Johnson) stumble upon a secret Egyptian tomb—which is odd, since Egypt is hundred of miles away. With the help of brilliant, beautiful archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), who Nick slept with and then abandoned, they realize this is the missing crypt of Ahmanet—and that her jailers wanted to bury her far away from her home to protect themselves.
Directed by Alex Kurtzman, who as a writer had a hand in Transformers, Mission: Impossible and Star Trek films, The Mummy is an action-horror movie in which the scares are built into suspense sequences involving car chases, plane crashes and the inevitable final showdown between good and evil.
Kurtzman may not have a particularly lively directorial style, but he knows how to slam together effective action set pieces. As Nick and his team transport the coffin by cargo plane, The Mummy gives us our first sense of Ahmanet’s horrific powers as she uses her voodoo to control Chris and summon a squadron of blackbirds to bring down their aircraft. This gripping sequence, like others in The Mummy, is entirely dependent on impressive technical work and visceral editing—especially because, as characters, Nick and the others aren’t particularly compelling. Eventually, we’ll learn that Ahmanet has the ability to drain her victims of their life force by kissing them, turning them into pliable zombies willing to do her bidding. It’s a sad irony of this film that they’re only slightly less inert than our main characters.
It’s trite to observe that, where once movie stars drove audiences to the theater, now brand-name franchises are the selling point. (How depressing it is to live in an age in which entertainment journalists talk about studios’ intellectual properties with the same fevered enthusiasm that they used to discuss a breakout actor.) Cruise was one of the last A-listers to withstand this franchise glut, reliably churning out Mission: Impossible films but also taking chances on original ideas like Knight & Day, Oblivion and Edge of Tomorrow. Alas, he now seems to have grasped that even superstars need the security of familiar properties to maintain their cultural relevance. First, he dipped his toe into the world of Jack Reacher, a moderately well-known book series, but with The Mummy he’s fully embracing Hollywood’s obsession with supersizing its movies into multi-film installments.
Although The Mummy is mostly a standalone film, you’d be able to pick up on Universal’s ambitions even if you didn’t read the trades. The appearance of Russell Crowe as Dr. Henry Jekyll, the mysterious leader of an underground organization tasked with tracking the world’s monsters, demonstrates that The Mummy is meant to be the opening salvo in an upcoming group of movies about different horror characters. (Frankenstein and Invisible Man films are in the works already.) And like so many franchise-setup films, The Mummy bears the telltale signs of an anonymous, big-budgeted production that is largely concerned with establishing a tone, creating a cinematic universe and, most importantly, not screwing anything up so that lucrative future chapters can flourish.