Dead awakening

Have you ever watched a TV show or movie that intellectually, by every artistic criterion, you knew was bad, and yet, on a guilty-pleasure level, you found entertaining? The plot is outlandish; the dialogue is cheesy; the characters are undeveloped and often do and say things that don’t jibe with the few broad, clichéd strokes of personality that have been drawn for them. But you still can’t say you didn’t have a good time. Such was my experience of Tom Cruise’s old-school monster movie, The Mummy.

While stretching its PG-13 rating to include plenty of blurry rear and profile nudity from actress Sofia Boutella as said mummy, the movie plays like a loose mashup of George Romero’s cult horror flicks and the B-rate Indiana Jones knockoff, King Solomon’s Mines. Yet thanks largely to the cast, this exercise in pure popcorn-munching diversion succeeds to some degree despite a tomb-full of deficiencies.

There’s a reason every good actor isn’t also a movie star. You can have the looks, the training, and all the Oscar-worthy talent in the world, yet lack that elusive quality that lights up the screen. Even after 30 years in the game, almost no one puts out as much wattage as Cruise. As Nick Morton, an Army reconnaissance specialist with a side hustle in grave robbing, Cruise oozes his signature cocky charisma. It’s been a while since he’s played anything but a true-blue, solid-gold hero, but he returns to the role of anti-heroic rake as easily as if Top Gun were only yesterday.

When we meet him, he’s being chastised by an implausibly young and beautiful Egyptologist for stealing her lead on the location of some antiquities and, worse, leaving her with no goodbye after a one-night stand. They continue to bicker and to build chemistry as they uncover the sarcophagus of a Pharaoh’s daughter mysteriously erased from history. Naturally, Nick’s recklessness awakens the creature’s long-buried plans to unleash Set, aka “the god of death,” aka Lucifer, on the world.

In all the twists and turns that follow, there’s a lot you won’t see coming—mostly because it doesn’t make sense. Like why would the corpses of Crusades warriors rise to serve an Egyptian sorceress? Or why does Nick’s ghost sidekick (that’s right, there’s a ghost sidekick) sometimes try to help him and other times lead him into trouble? It doesn’t matter. The point is that actor Jake Johnson brings plenty of dry humor to the role of Nick’s spectral wingman, and the skeleton knights look cool.

The entrance of a certain Dr. Jekyll, who heads up a murky British organization to find and contain monsters, is even more ludicrous, but it’s hard not to feel infected with at least a little of the fun Russell Crowe has with the role. Sure, Crowe no doubt understood his real job when he signed on to the project, as did Cruise and Johnson: to launch a supernatural franchise that will allow Universal to compete with Warner Bros.’ Justice League and Disney’s Avengers. But one might as well cut loose while achieving cold corporate goals.

Dark Universe, as this connected series of releases will be called, doesn’t come close to Marvel’s or DC's level. And though The Mummy plays the horror link more for spectacle than to inspire anything close to actual fear, the film has a distinct darkness that puts it out of step with its rivals. By treating evils like Satanic rituals and demonic possession as things to gawk and wink at, The Mummy buries the clear moral themes that make superhero movies so popular. Making light of darkness may curse this franchise.