'The Mummy' - Movie Review

I've never seen the 1932 version of "The Mummy," but I'm a huge fan of the 1999 movie starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. To me, it's the ultimate camp horror movie: it's wickedly funny (intentionally so), it's got a bunch of good scares, and it's got a pair of exceptionally charming leads. The sequels were pretty awful, but the first one was a minor masterpiece of horror comedy that I've watched four or five times.

Given not only the appalling reviews but the failure at the box office, I wasn't expecting much from this. It was fun to see the giant "Dark Universe" logo after the "Universal" films logo - this being the failed start of a grand new set of movies apparently intended to equal the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But not if you start like this. The parts that were supposed to be funny were stale, and the parts that were supposed to be scary were funny - although not funny enough to make this a classic bad movie.

The basic premise is that a treasure-hunting soldier named Nick Morton (Tom Cruise, playing this one by the numbers) awakens the evil ancient Egyptian Princess Ahmanet - who is intent on raising Set, the god of death. He's assisted in his fight against her - after a fashion - by employees of Prodigium ... which is run by Dr. Henry Jekyll (remember him? can't seem to keep that Hyde character under control). Ahmanet tears up London, and uses Jennifer Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), a woman Morton likes, as bait. There's one reference to the movie's far superior predecessor: we see one of the metal-bound books with a keyed cover from the previous series at Prodigium for a moment.

I had to go back and watch part of the 1999 version again after this one to get the bad taste out of my mouth.