The Mummy (2017)

THE MUMMY  (2017)  ¢ ¢
    D: Alex Kurtzman
    Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Annabelle Wallis,
    Russell Crowe, Jake Johnson, Courtney B. Vance
Boris Karloff can rest easy, I guess. For all the remakes, sequels, reboots and reworkings that have come along since, nobody's quite matched the ghostly horror of "The Mummy" in 1932. Nobody's even come close. This action feature stars Tom Cruise as a dashing thief who locates and digs up ancient artifacts and sells them to the highest bidder. He's also in the Army, a plot point that makes little sense to begin with and gets dropped along the way. Tom's in Iraq, where he's dodging bombs and bullets on the way to unearthing an ancient Egyptian burial chamber. (Egypt's a few hundred miles from Iraq, but, oh, never mind.) There he finds, preserved in mercury, the sarcophagus of an ancient Egyptian princess who did something terrible a few thousand years ago and was cursed and buried alive. Also, there's a cute archeologist played by Annabelle Wallis, because, really, don't all female archeologists look like dishy blonde movie stars? So Tom and the archeologist fly the mummy off to London, where there's another burial chamber filled with the corpses of crusaders, and it doesn't take long for the dead to come back to life and wreak havoc among the living. This isn't a horror movie as much as it is a special effects show. There's nothing in it that's the least bit new or original or scary, and in an age of visual overkill, even the effects aren't that special. (I did like the part where Tom gets attacked by a horde of rats.) The rampaging crusaders look like George Romero's zombies as imagined by Ray Harryhausen, and Tom looks like he's in great shape, but his eternal youthfulness is starting to suggest that he's maybe had some help along the way. I'm not sure that's the case, but men in their mid-50s, even well preserved ones, don't typically resemble fratboys on their way to spring break. Maybe there's a Dorian Gray thing going on there, or maybe all that Scientology has a Botoxing effect. Russell Crowe plays Dr. Henry Jekyll, and while the connection with Robert Louis Stevenson is minimal, at least you know he had a good time. The folks at Universal are obviously hoping to kick off a franchise here, but if they really want that to happen, they'd better do better than this. Boris Karloff, rest in peace.