The premise of this Alex Kurtzman directed remake begins in Iraq in the modern day world where we meet our lead character, Nick Morton (Tom Cruise), a guy who just goes around collecting lost trinkets and selling them on the black market with his pal Chris Vail (Jake Johnson). From the moment we're introduced to Nick Morton, one can already tell that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Nick is obviously supposed to be a scoundrel with a heart of gold protagonist in the vein of Han Solo, Jack Sparrow or Tony Stark, but he's such a poorly written version of that archetype. None of his quippy lines land at all and he comes off as more stupid rather than endearingly courageous or entertaining or anything like that.
Not helping the character is that Tom Cruise is incredibly miscast in this role. Cruise is a talented guy who can play cool as a cucumber characters like Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible movies or more well-written flawed individuals like his lead character in War Of The Worlds super well, but here? He just seems lost. He seems tired when he should be rambunctious, he gives off some of the worst delivers I've ever seen Tom Cruise give in a movie and this is all before the titular Mummy shows up. Plus, it must be said, he seems way too old for this part. Nick Morton reads like a 30-35 year old character and putting a guy like Tom Cruise whose pushing 55 in the part seems like a joke. Him being that old makes gives already creepy moments like Nick leering at his 31 year old love interests exposed midriff (which the camera ogles from an angle that isn't from his eyeline, so the filmmakers can't even use the o'l "It's from his perspective!" excuse to justify their gratuitous objectifaction) even more unsettling to watch.
So, The Mummy has started off with a generic Iraq-set action sequence that establishes a lead character that's both terribly written and awfully miscast. We're off to the races here obviously. But things only get worse once The Mummy (Sofia Boutella) is risen and starts creating mystical chaos. This is when the movie goes from being just bad to nonsensical in the worst kind of ways. It's here that The Mummy takes possession of Nick Morton, allowing him to see the ghost of Chris (he dies super early on), who adds nothing to the movie beyond being a stupid expository device. Ghost Jake Johnson (I must know if he's friends with Ghost Denis Leary, a prominent character from Alex Kurtzman's screenplay for The Amazing Spider-Man 2) informs Nick that The Mummy has big plans for him that involve Nick being possessed by an ancient Egyptian spirit.
Anyone who hopes this revelation will lead to plenty of Tom Cruise vs. The Mummy antics will be sorely disappointed. There is shockingly little action in this movie and you'd think the bare minimum a Tom Cruise action movie would do is give its lead star some cool stunts to do. Even dreck like Knight & Day did that! Not so here, as The Mummy is much more interested in having both Nick and an enchained The Mummy carry out an extended stay at a secret organization named Prodigium, a S.H.I.E.L.D.-like entity that keeps tabs on monsters all over the planet. This place is run by Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe), another master of dull exposition.
The already boring and ridiculous in all the wrong ways plot of The Mummy just becomes nonsensical once we get to Prodigium, as all this time spent with Crowe and the secret organization (who live in an abandoned warehouse I guess...couldn't they make a cool set for these Prodigium people if we were gonna spend so much time here?) robs us of the chance to see any cool monster action or get to know our lead characters better. Well, OK, to be fair, we do get a Monster Mash in the form of Nick Morton fighting Dr. Jekyll's evil later-ego, Edward Hyde. Anyone hoping some neat monster make-up will emerge once Mr. Hyde comes on-screen will be sorely disappointed since Mr. Hyde is just Russell Crowe with purple veins on his face. Him and Tom Cruise duke it out in a laughably bad fight sequence that has fight choreography that would have been middling on that Iron Fist TV show. This completely extraneous sequence ends up fulfilling some dude's weird fantasy of seeing Russell Crowe and Tom Cruise duke it out in a summer blockbuster. I'd typically call these kind of story structure-related issues "plot holes" but that would be inaccurate here since they're not really plot holes. No, you'd need an actual plot for plot holes to exist and The Mummy doesn't even have a whisper of a plot.
By the way, notice how I haven't talked about the titular monster, The Mummy herself? Well, there's a reason for that in that she doesn't get anything to do besides embody a bunch of misogynistic traits. The big backstory for this incarnation of the character is that Princess Ahmanet was in the line for the throne until her father had a son, who, due to royal matters in this society deferring to the men of the family, meant she would no longer rule Egypt. In order to obtain royal power, she dabbled in evil mystical mumbo-jumbo, killed her dad and baby brother and was mummified alive. So our entire motivation for this new Mummy is "Woman wants more power in a society that won't let her because of her gender, so of course, she goes on a murder spree and becomes evil. Remember your place ladies!" To hell with that nonsense! Plus, the fact that she kills and then possesses mortal beings by way of french kissing them (ya can't make this stuff up folks) has more a twinge of slut-shaming to it, because this movie wasn't icky enough. Why give The Mummy any sort of interesting motivation or personality when we can just load her up with every sexist cliche of female characters in the book?
All of those icky gender politics are basically it in terms of giving Ahmanet a personality, which can be partially (though far from entirely) chalked up to a lack of screentime. A rushed through backstory and a prelude to the climax (where she conjures up a massive Sandstorm in London powerful enough to shatter Big Ben that has absolutely no bearing on the plot whatsoever) are the only parts where The Mummy herself gets anything to do, a criminal waste of Sofia Boutella and her numerous talents. A villain maybe not having enough to do might be forgiven if the other characters in the story were at all interesting but Nick Morton is a disaster as a character and no one else gets anything to do in the movie; Nick's love interest, for instance, is solely around to be a damsel-in-distress. But then again, the characters being at all involving might have been weird in a movie like The Mummy that goes so badly awry in every area conceivable, from the listless directing from Alez Kurtzman (the guy's main signified as a filmmaker just seems to steal a lot of visual tics from directors he's written for in the past, most notably those pervasive lens flares from J.J. Abrams) to the laughable dialogue to the dire lack of cool monster stuff to a climax that ends the entire trainwreck of a motion picture with 10 minutes of pure incoherent idiocy. It's not a good sign for this movie that a quick shot of a dead individual lying on the ground after being slain by undead menaces had me wondering "Boy, I wish I could trade places with that dead guy right about now."
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