The Mummy (2017) — the first monster movie in the Dark Universe franchise.
Laurels of the financial success of Marvel cinematic universe don’t give rest to many large film studios as all they want is to repeat this success. Most recently, we watched another step in this direction from the side of DC, which finally made an excellent origin film Wonder Woman after the unsuccessful releases of Batman VS Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad. DC already has a new film in production — Justice League, while Marvel has almost ready Spider-Man: Homecoming. The battle is on.
Since the copyrights for all more or less well-known superheroes are already occupied by two above-mentioned studios, the Legendary Entertainment studio undertook to create its own cinematic universe with huge monsters. We already saw a not very successful Godzilla. After that, a stunningly awesome Kong: Skull Island. It is known that at least two more films have already been planned in this series — Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) and Godzilla vs. Kong (2020).
Meanwhile, Universal Pictures studio is also making an attempt to create its cinematic universe. So, a new franchise Dark Universe was introduced for the series of classic monsters films, which meant to be part of the shared universe. According to the different sources, Universal Pictures has a slew of classic monsters at its disposal. Monsters like:
- Frankenstein,
- Dracula,
- The Wolf Man,
- Creature Of The Black Lagoon,
- The Invisible Man,
- Bride Of Frankenstein,
- The Mummy,
- and many others…
The Mummy (2017) is the first film in this new franchise. By the way, the following film has already been announced. It will be Bride Of Frankenstein, in which Javier Bardem will play the legendary monster.
Dark Universe did not manage to create a masterpiece on the first try, but The Mummy (2017) is definitely not a failure. A good spectacular, entertaining, beautifully made action-adventure movie. The pace of the narrative is quite fast, which is typical for such films. The plot of the film is fundamentally different from all the previous big screen adaptations of the same movie. The Mummy (2017) contains some references to the upcoming films and some characters unambiguously hint that we will see them again. Also during the viewing, you can notice a few references to The Mummy (1999).
In the new The Mummy Tom Cruise is still playing typical Tom Cruise’s character. I did not even remember the name of his character. The actor does not even bother at least to change his hairstyle from one film to another. It may look that he plays the same character in every movie. As in his every movie he runs away from or towards the danger. But in this film he does not ride a motorcycle, which is a surprise for me, as riding a motorcycle is his second trademark move after running. I was glad to see Jake Johnson on a secondary role, who became the source of most of the funny moments and jokes in the film. I know him well from the comedy TV series New Girl. The famous dancer Sofia Boutella in the role of Princess Ahmanet not striking in acting, but looks great on the screen due to her exotic look. I’m eager to see her again on the big screen in the upcoming film Atomic Blonde, where she will play along with Charlize Theron. Annabelle Wallis played an archaeologist and girlfriend of the Tom Cruise’s character, who unfortunately became the most boring and uninteresting character in the film. Perhaps the most interesting role went to Russell Crowe. I will not say who he played, but I can intrigue you by the fact that we will definitely see him in the other films of this new franchise. Basically, his character is the only obvious way to connect totally unrelated stories of popular monsters.
Conclusion: The Mummy (2017) is a decent attempt to produce an entertaining action-adventure movie and make a stepping stone for further sequels, while it is also worth watching as a standalone movie. We will see in a few years from now how capable Dark Universe will be to match high standards for blockbusters set by Marvel films. So far it’s not even close, but there is always a hope.