THE MUMMY [Review]: An Adventurous Mercury Poisoning.

With glass shattering sandstorms that would make Mad Max adjust his sand-riddled boxers, an overabundance of crows that would leave Eric Draven screaming, “Uncle!,” and a super-sized cluster of camel spiders that would send Peter Parker into a sensory overloaded coma, Alex Kurtzman’s The Mummy has arrived to kick off Universal’s new Dark Universe and remind everyone that Tom Cruise’s completely smooth 54-year-old nutsack will have less wrinkles over the course of its entire lifetime than you or I will develop over the forthcoming decade.

The latest resurrection of The Mummy features Sofia Boutella as Ahmanet; an Egyptian princess who murdered her family and decided that Set, the Egyptian god of death, was the neatest thing since mercury embalming. Set bestowed these intimidating mummy powers upon Ahmanet for being his number one fan like the ever useful but kinda corny power to communicate with a single spider, all of the turquoise paint you could dip your fingertips in, the ability to make a murder of crows cackle and confusingly loiter, how to rearrange a sandstorm to make a giant version of your face Wooly Willy style, gather a mischief of rats to suckle on the succulent teets of an aged to perfection Jerry Maguire, and a toss-up between a lifetime supply of eyeliner and stalking Tom Cruise in his dreams.

Since Set did Ahmanet a solid, in return, she is to use his dagger (with a handle embedded with a magical strawberry Ring Pop at the end of it) and violently plunge it into a chosen one who would be Set’s human vessel aka meatbag aka Tom Cruise.

Tom Cruise, armed with a whiny Jake Johnson at his side, portrays Nick Morton; a tomb raiding treasure hunter who takes all of his cues from Nathan Drake in Uncharted and Jackie Chan in his Operation Condor films. The entire treasure hunting concept is shoehorned into the film to make way for Ahmanet slurping down police officers like Capri Suns while turning their sunken remains into an army of brittle mummified zombies. Some of the action scenes that follow are surprisingly good as Tom shoves his baby hands and tiny feet through decomposing faces and hollow chests.

Meanwhile Russell Crowe is busy turning in an underwhelming performance as Dr. Henry Jekyll and Annabelle Wallis can’t decide whether to be spiteful, knowledgeable, and bitchy or completely helpless, in need of rescuing, and procuring a moist sphinx cat between her legs when it comes to thinking about Nick as Jenny Halsey.

Every predictable layer found within the derivative bandages of The Mummy reveals the sarcophagi of a dull and crusty film. The performances are stale other than Tom Cruise who is excited about shit no one else can bother with. The dialogue is hokey as hell and will likely result in audible groans throughout whatever theater you’re dragged to. What’s misleading is that some of the visuals are impressive; the action is often entertaining if no one on-screen opens their mouth, and that falling plane sequence is pretty incredible but Tom Cruise doing fucking ridiculous action sequences has become the norm and The Mummy is just more of the same.

This film is the first in what appears to be a long line of “scary” franchise films and a possibly massive universe revolving around updated versions of classic Universal monsters. If every one of those films is as lame as this one, then wheel an entire pyramid full of liquid mercury up to my house and I will chug that shit with a crazy straw so I can at least lose my mind and pretend to have a good time watching these boring monstrosities before we all wither away from insanity. 1/5 Pointless Crow Cackling Bibles.

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