Tom Cruise: The Cursed Avenger

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So it seems like The Mummy is basically just a Tom Cruise vanity project in which he runs about looking cool with a couple of women obsessing over him as though both oblivious to his weird middletooth... Google it if you don't know what I mean by that. The film begins in which we see a large drill performing an act that can only be described as boring and in many ways that should have prepared us for the rest of the film. This scene is set in England which we can tell for two reasons. The first is the big text on screen saying “England”, the second is that it takes approximately eight seconds before we hear somebody say “Bloody hell!”. Along its path the drill accidentally finds a tomb of dead crusaders which leads Russell Crowe to waddle in and begin telling us about the history of an Egyptian Mummy... for some reason. He plays Dr Jykle and Mr Hyde because everything has to be a shared universe now... more on that in a bit. However he's essentially just an overweight guy with a bad cockney accent. If anybody sees Ray Winstone heading towards Russell Crowe after he's seen this film and with a sock in his hand then make sure to get out of his fucking way.


So Russell Crowe tells us that there was once a bad woman in Egypt who tried to bring a demon into our world.. or.. something? I was never quite clear on that and I can't be arsed Googling it. Anyway, the thing she did was so bad that she was mummified and buried alive in a part of the world that Tom Cruise ultimately stumbles across. Once this happens, Cruise and a blonde woman whose name I can't remember and also can't be arsed Googling, decide to keep the Mummy and her sarcophagus because fuck it I guess they're on their holidays. Going abroad and not coming back with a piece of that country's history or a dead member of its Royal family is a bit like going to Blackpool and not buying a stick of rock... or going to Toxteth and not shiving the fuck out of somebody. Sadly this Mummy is cursed to come back to life and so as they're flying away with her, she causes the plane to crash and Tom Cruise to die. Cut to black. Credits roll. The end. Nah, not really. There's still about ninety minutes to go... For fuck's sake...

It turns out that Tom Cruise is now cursed with the Mummy convinced that he's her chosen one.. or.. something? The blonde woman also survived the plane crash because as their plane was going down, Cruise popped a parachute on her and pushed her out to safety. I presume he only did that so there'd be somebody left to tell the story of how amazing Tom Cruise was, because most of the things that his character does are kind of dickish and self-centred. Which would be fine if that wasn't his sole character trait or one that we were meant to forgive in the face of his natural charm. I know it's fashionable to dislike Cruise but as I sit here in my Spider-Man onsie, I'm happy to admit that being fashionable is something I've never been at risk of being. I'm therefore also happy to admit that I'm a huge Tom Cruise fan with recent films such as Edge Of Tomorrow and Mission: Impossible: Rogue Nation being two great examples of why there's no reason to hate him. Sure he has a weird personal life and he's a member of a cult, but I'm an atheist.. as far as I'm concerned anybody that's part of any religion is basically part of a cult. I couldn't give a shit. However here his character really is non-existent. Take one Tom Cruise performance and add a sprinkle of dickishness to distinguish it slightly from everything else, and that's basically what you have here.

Although at least he has that attribute because the blonde woman in the film couldn't be more two dimensional had they cast a cardboard cut out of some skinny bitch from an underwear catalogue in the role. She's also over twenty years younger than Cruise himself which puts him a little too close into that creepy old-man zone that Roger Moore's 58 year old Bond once found himself in. I mean, I can see that Tom Cruise is in great shape for a human, let alone a human of his age. There's at least one scene in this movie in which he's naked and keeps his arms raised at a weird angle because he thinks he's going to have a fight and I guess that's his fighting stance. Also if he lowers his arms you can see that his skin is starting to get a little bit droopy in an old-ladies-tits kind of way. However I have no idea why this woman fancies Cruise in the way that she does because he clearly is a dick. She thinks that secretly he must be a nice guy, although, why she thinks this is completely beyond me? I can only assume that she's one of those women you hear always saying, “Oh why do I always fall for the bastards?” Whilst completely oblivious to the answer of, “because you're obviously fucking gullible”.

However as I mentioned, as well as the blonde woman, Cruise is also being stalked by the reanimated Mummy who literally acts like a crazy ex. Although to the film's credit, at least being from ancient Egypt, this woman is slightly closer to Tom Cruise's actual age. Although even she's played by the thirty five year old Sofia Boutella which puts her at 19 years younger than him. On the one hand I suppose I should complement the film on casting a woman as the main villain. It's slightly original and she is by far the strongest character in the film. However it would have been nice if they'd then given her something more interesting to do than stalk Tom Cruise like a woman that's drank too much coffee and watched Jerry Maguire after a mental break-down. Also as she walks through the movie with her tatty bandages, you do sometimes wonder if they cast a female in the role just so that we could see a bit of tit and her sexy mummified arse. They really shouldn't have cast such an attractive woman as a member of the living dead because it seems like a gateway image to necrophilia. On my way back from the cinema, the thought of her put me in the mood and so I figured I'd dig some bodies up from the local cemetery. As usual, it seems that Hollywood has to glorify everything!

However I'd be lying if I said I hated this film because I didn't. I didn't love it either obviously although it did have some nice set-pieces in and it didn't take itself too seriously I suppose. There's a character in it that's essentially Tom Cruises mate that's died and so now only he can see. Maybe that was okay? I hated it because it was like a shit rip-off of the dead guy in An American Werewolf In London. But at least they tried to stop things from getting too dull I suppose. The problems really do just arise when the action slows.. and you realise there's no characters.. and the plot is a little on the misogynist side. There's a plane crash scene that's pretty fun, Cruise runs a lot which is always enjoyable, and there's a good chase in which Cruise drives an ambulance so fast that you'd think it was being chased by a Tory with a 'vehicle for sale' poster. Although if this is to be the first of a shared Universe then it's not the worst start.. it's just not the best either. Obviously not everything has to be a fucking shared Universe however at least Universal's horror characters have a cinematic legacy of it with things such as 1943's Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman. It just might have been a better idea to have focussed more on making it scary than simply putting action into it because Marvel really do have the action thing down. The closest this thing has to horror is by simply filming the entire thing with a grey, boring, filter over everything which ironically is also something that DC's shared Universe has covered too. Thanks for reading, motherfuckers, and see you next time.