Roses Have Thoughts

Whereas Marvel had some stand-alone films under their belt before launching The Avengers, Warner Bros. Pictures attempted in a rather clumsy manner to launch an extended DC cinematic universe from scratch, that whilst not winning over many critics, did start off producing decent enough returns for the studio, and in this business, money talks.

The so-called “Dark Universe” had been in the works for a while, with its first stab at creating a MonsterVerse coming in 2014 with the Dracula origin story Dracula Untold, sadly despite an interesting storyline and a strong cast, the film failed to make the kind of returns needed to justify sequels, instead, The Mummy became Universals second crack of the whip.

You would be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t heard of at least one of Universals monsters, from Count Dracula to Frankenstein’s Monster, The Wolf Man to The Creature from the Black Lagoon, these creatures are synonymous with classic horror pictures and a staple of the Golden era of Hollywood, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone that Universal would want to bring back some of their prized assets to the silver screen and at the same time jump on the recent bandwagon of extended universes, especially as there was a certain amount of commingling going on between the monsters back in the day.

Much the same as the 1999 version starring Brendan Fraser, the story revolves around a cocky hero Nick Moreton (Cruise) stumbling upon an ancient tomb whilst searching for treasure, accidentally releasing the malevolent Princess Ahmanet and ending up cursed to become the human host of the Egyptian god Set in the process.

I’ll start with the bad points as sadly there were more than a few, the biggest of which is the clumsy way in which the extended universe is forced into the movie, with scenes and characters introduced to the audience that make no real difference to the plot, in fact, most of the time it just slows the main plot against, this is especially true of Russell Crowe‘s character, whom I felt had his true nature revealed way to casually, whereas a more slow reveal would have made an excellent twist at the end of the film going into the sequels.

Another of the main issues I found with the film was the contrasting tones, switching between straight-up horror and happy-go-lucky action flick, is a way that clashes rather than blend together, with some action sequences reminiscent of the equally derided League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

My final criticism of the film was the lack of development of the supporting cast, with practically everyone apart from Nick Moreton feeling like an afterthought, with next to no character development given to them apart from a line here and there, meaning half the time you don’t really care if they are in danger or not.

The movie did, however, have some good points, the horror elements of the film were generally the best bits and sometimes quite scary, making the character of Princess Ahmanet an interesting and imposing foe throughout, whilst Cruise clearly tried his hardest to escape his comfort zone and try his hand at something different to what he usually appears in, sadly neither of these are enough to make the film anything other than a middle of the road monster feature.

You can see what Universal was trying to do with The Mummy, sadly it’s not that easy to make both an interesting stand-alone film and launch a cinematic universe from scratch, And I for one, wished they had succeeded as I would love to see some famous old creatures return to the big screen.

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