BEFORE: Before I get to tonight's film, I want to mention that I found out today that an ex-employer of mine passed away, the man who put Claymation on the map as an animation art form - Will Vinton. Though I didn't work for him directly, I worked for over 20 years in the office of his studio's NY sales rep, so in a way he was kind of my boss's boss for a long time. I got to travel to Portland, Oregon twice for various sales meetings and conferences, and worked at a lot of promotional events in NYC that were designed to publicize Will Vinton Studios, or maybe some were just parties for ad agency people that helped to increase their awareness of the studio or of clay animation in general, so for a long time we had common goals, at least. If you can remember the California Raisins, or the Domino's Noid, or when the m&m's commercials switched over to CGI candy characters, those all came out of WVS.
At some point Will brought in a board of directors to run things when he decided to semi-retire, and then the board (led by Phil Knight of Nike) decided to retire him the rest of the way, forcing him out of his own studio. There's a lesson to be learned there, I think - but the studio changed its name to Laika and went on to make animated features like "The Corpse Bride", "Coraline", "Paranorman" and "The Boxtrolls" after they showed him the door, so who's to say that corporate decision didn't make some sense in the end? Anyway, I'd bump into Will Vinton from time to time on the San Diego Comic-Con showroom floor, and he always remembered me and made time for a chat. I'm sorry to see him go, he was a real legend (not a contradiction) in the animation world.
What does this have to do with Halloween? Well, two things, besides the annual Halloween events our company used to throw to promote the studios we represented. One time, I think in 2002, we threw a party at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, because someone at Vinton Studios had made a short stop-motion film called "Dia de Los Muertos" about the Mexican Day of the Dead festivities, and we rented a big bus to take creatives from the NYC agencies out to this cemetery in Brooklyn, where we screened the film for them in a little chapel, plus we had catered snacks. It was a fun October event, and this was YEARS before any major studio made films like "The Book of Life" or "Coco" based on that holiday. The night came to an end, the creatives got back on the bus, and I loaded up the van with the supplies to take back to the office, and went to drive back to my condo in Brooklyn, which was only about 10 blocks away. Only the cemetery gate was locked at the exit I was told to use, and for a while it looked like I'd be spending a long night in a cemetery, but eventually my boss tracked down a groundskeeper and sent him to unlock the gate so I could leave. Whew...
Another promotion we did was to get a van load of pumpkins delivered to the office, I mean we had a whole room full of pumpkins in our cramped office, and they got messengered out to various agency personnel, along with carving kits, to see who could make the best jack-o-lanterns. Bear in mind this was only a few years after the Unabomber targeted some ad agencies, and here we were, sending little knives and saws to people's offices, and I was sure we'd get in some kind of trouble. Worse, we sent some pumpkins and carving kits through the MAIL to ad agencies up and down the East Coast, and again, I was sure that sending sharp objects by mail, along with perishable fruit (yes, a pumpkin is a fruit) would have raised some alarm bells. Nope, it seems nothing that bad happened, unless someone was on vacation that week and came back later to a box filled with a rotting pumpkin.
We did a lot of crazy stuff like that over 20 years, those are just two that stick out in my memory. We delivered so many pumpkins that year that even now, years later, I can't bring myself to buy a pumpkin, let alone carve one. I get the shakes just thinking about it - no thanks, I did my time. I've still got PTSD (pumpkin-traumatic shipping disorder).
Javier Botet carries over again from "It".
THE PLOT: An ancient Egyptian princess is awakened from her crypt beneath the desert, bringing with her malevolence grown over millennia, and terrors that defy human comprehension.
AFTER: I got really lucky that the five biggest, most action-packed recent horror films that I wanted to see, and that were available to me, all linked together rather neatly. But now my luck runs out, it was bound to eventually. I could have gone from "Crimson Peak" to "The Mummy" to "It" and then to "The Dark Tower", which shared an actor with "It", but I think that would have been a dead end, so to speak. That doesn't link to any other horror film on my list, so instead I have to go from THIS mummy-based film to another one, in a lateral move that I'll explain tomorrow. Either way, it means that my linking's getting more and more difficult, and eventually I'll have to give it up as a device for choosing the next film.
These days it seems having a hit movie just isn't enough, every company wants to turn their movie properties into a franchise. Blame Marvel/Disney, who wasn't satisfied with just making one Hulk and one Iron Man movie, they asked, "How do we turn this into 20 more movies?" and everyone else tried to follow suit. So "Kong: Skull Island" is an example of this, they tried to shoehorn Kong into the Godzilla-verse, so they can make more movies in the future where all the giant monsters fight each other. And so there's an attempt here also, to connect this "Mummy" plot to a larger monster-filled world that could go on to contain new versions of Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, the Wolfman and so on.
But to do that, the films have to be good enough to make the fans want to step back into that universe, again and again. And so they threw Tom Cruise at the mummy this time instead of Brendan Fraser, and added another classic movie monster character that could serve as the connection to the larger monster-verse in the future. Hint, he's a Doctor and his character also appeared in "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", another film that could have (should have?) had at least one sequel. Really, they didn't even have to use the same characters, there were comic book sequels to that story that featured James Bond, the Martians from "The War of the Worlds" and more - letting that franchise just die on the vine seems like a huge waste.
The problem here is that this storyline just wasn't all that great, so future plans to expand this monster-verse seem to be on hold. Getting killed at the box office by "Wonder Woman" didn't help, I'm sure. Putting together some stunts that would be more at home in a "Mission: Impossible" film, along with giving Tom Cruise's character the ability to come back from the dead several times, which seems straight out of "Edge of Tomorrow", made this feel like a film cobbled-together from pieces of other films and franchises. Then they wrapped up those dead, stale ideas in a bunch of bandages and waited for this movie to resurrect itself into a hit, and instead it just came D.O.A.
It's not ALL bad, though - I like the idea of having a female Mummy villain, I haven't seen that before, and it did lead to a more interesting take on the character. You can't have a male monster these days, anyway, shuffling around and grabbing women, kissing them and then killing them. That's so very un-P.C. given the last year's headlines. Ah, but send a female mummy out to ravage the world of men, and now maybe you're talking about some empowerment. OK, maybe she's evil but at least she's empowered. She wants to bring back Set, the Egyptian god of the dead, and to do that, she's got to kill Cruise's Nick Morton with a special blade that has a special stone in the handle. Because there are rules for this sort of thing. Morton, on the other hand, watched his best friend become a thrall for Ahmanet (the Mummy) and things didn't work out so well for him.
So after they find Ahmanet's sarcophagus buried in Iraq (which is a bit of a weird place for an Egyptian mummy to be found) they bring it back to London, which would only be a problem if THAT'S where the sword and the stone are. Whoopsie. In a typical movie coincidence, an underground tomb was recently discovered in London, containing the holy men who swore to keep the stone out of the wrong hands. Shocker, that didn't really work out either. After a plane crash that Ahmanet survives (because she's already dead, or something) and Morton somehow does, too, it's a race across town to get the stone before Ahmanet can absorb enough souls to heal her body back from its withered state.
But there are still a lot of unanswered questions here, like how did Ahmanet survive all those centuries, with no food or water, buried in a sarcophagus. Did her hate or desire for revenge keep her alive? They show in the flashbacks how she was mummified alive, but how is that even possible? The Egyptians took out a pharaoh's organs when they mummified him, and put those in jars, so by technical definition, if somebody was somehow still alive when they started the process, that person wouldn't still be alive when they were done. There's more to "mummification" then just tossing somebody in a sarcophagus and closing it.
Also starring Tom Cruise (last seen in "History of the Eagles"), Sofia Boutella (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Annabelle Wallis (last seen in "The Brothers Grimsby"), Jake Johnson (last seen in "Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates"), Courtney B. Vance (last heard in "Isle of Dogs"), Russell Crowe (last seen in "A Good Year"), Marwan Kenzari (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Selva Rasalingam (last seen in "Risen"), Neil Maskell.
RATING: 5 out of 10 zombie minions
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