A ‘Mummy’ reboot that’s fun, even as it unravels

Tom Cruise faces a perilous moment in the movie trailer that’s been shown in cinemas prior to the release of The Mummy: the actor is about to be torn apart by ghouls on an altar, when a cell phone tone rudely interrupts the action. Cruise does a double-take, then looks to the doorway to see his love interest obliviously answering a call; “Jenny!” he screeches in that high-pitched voice of his, and we’re reminded to put our phones on silent mode.

That bit of lampoonery captures what’s right and wrong about The Mummy reboot by Universal Pictures. It wants to be scary, but funny, too. Actually, it might not know exactly what it wants to be.

Snatching away its story from the 1932 Boris Karloff classic, as well as the Brendan Fraser/Dwayne Johnson franchise from 2000s, The Mummy fashions it into something weird and new that Universal is calling the “Dark Universe.”

Steered by director Alex Kurtzman and Tom Cruise, this remake promises a franchise of “gods and monsters” to come, and we begin with Egyptian Princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), who long ago sought immortality by killing her father and stepmother, and was mummified alive for her sins. (And yes, she’s not the only princess in town — Gal Gadot is currently raking in big box office a few screens over. Let’s just say Ahmanet is less innocent and charming, but no less fearsome.)

Flash forward to Cruise, looking younger than his 54 years (maybe it’s some Egyptian embalming secret), playing Nick Morton, a soldier during the Iraq War who, with his pal Chris Vail (Jake Johnson), goes about thieving artifacts in his off-duty hours and selling them on the black market. Nick unwittingly opens up a buried sarcophagus sought by former one-night-stand Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), and soon all hell breaks loose.

You quickly notice the genuine scares are leavened with laughs in this Cruise/Mummy outing. Cruise’s pal Chris quickly becomes his ex-pal, leading to comical visitations from the afterlife that remind us of An American Werewolf in London. Nick and Jenny constantly spar, and the verbal sparks fly; they’re thrown together on cargo planes and cargo trucks, trying to outrun a curse thrown by a very shady and beglyphed ancient princess.

Cruise’s battle with the 5,000-year-old undead is indeed dark, with nice bits involving creepy crypts, rats and soul-sucking; but it’s also a hoot, thanks to the forced camaraderie between estranged lovers Nick and Jenny. They wrangle, even as he mugs while blasting a fist through a moldy avenging corpse’s skull. It’s basically a horror-comedy, set in modern-day Iraq and London.

Actually, a funny thing happened to Universal monsters after they first crept onto movie screens back in the 1930s and ‘40s: in the hands of German Expressionist cinematographers like Karl Freund (The Mummy, Dracula) they started out as moody, dead-serious outings (with the exception of James Whale’s campy Bride of Frankenstein).

Then, by 1948, Hollywood paired the monsters up with Abbott and Costello for laughs, and suddenly Count Dracula, the Frankenstein monster, the Wolf Man and the Mummy became punchlines. They lost all spooky credibility. And lo, the horror-comedy was born.

Does the new Mummy succeed as horror-comedy? Mostly. Boutella, with her tattooed visage and double pupils, does suggest the face of evil, even though she just really wants to hang on to her youth and remain powerful forever, like Beyoncé. And ever since Edge of Tomorrow, Cruise has become adept at delivering wide-eyed comical reactions. Abbott and Costello never got this visceral, but there’s a lot of double-taking and mugging going on here between Cruise and Wallis. 

Where the movie starts to reveal its master plan — and slowly unravel — is halfway through, when Russell Crowe turns up as pathology specialist Dr. Henry Jekyll. Yes, that Henry Jekyll. Furthering the “Dark Universe” theme, we learn that Universal wants to resurrect all those old monsters, now catalogued safely in glass jars and containers — there’s the Creature from the Black Lagoon’s fin, and isn’t that Dracula’s skull on the shelf? Before we can grapple with how these creatures ended up in Jekyll’s lab or how much of a franchise Universal is reaching for here, the movie settles into a third act, where Nick redeems himself a bit, pushing us toward a sequel.

Long ago, mummy movies could scare audiences just by showing some ancient, undead dude shuffling along in smelly old gauze; nowadays, the shocks have to be more abundant, and between the pulse-racing plane crash sequence and the hordes of Walking Dead extras besieging London, there’s certainly a lot of frenetic activity onscreen. Whether you’ll find it coherent or as appealing as the typical Marvel outing is a matter of taste.

One thing that does unsettle in a real-life kind of way is the movie’s setting in London, coming just days after another terror attack occurred there. Somehow, the sight of London Bridge and Big Ben beset by sandstorm clouds whipped up by the Princess is extra disturbing; then there’s the double-decker bus plowing sideways into the fleeing Cruise and Wallis to conjure up real-life terror from our daily news feeds. (The film’s June 1 premiere in the UK was cancelled in light of the attacks.)

Will all this mummery convince the average audience that Universal Monsters deserve a comeback? Time will tell. We live in an age where Toho’s Godzilla is being resurrected to do battle with RKO’s King Kong, and every DC and Marvel comic available is being laid out like a Hollywood treasure map; so why shouldn’t Drac, Frank, Wolfie and the Mummy get their day in the sun? Laughs or no laughs?