Film

Unraveled

I don’t hate The Mummy because it’s a terrible movie. I hate it because it could have, and should have, been good.

Actually, hate is a strong word. I just don’t like it. Opportunities abound for some real fun here, and they are all squandered in the end.

Tom Cruise is fully committed for a gonzo performance as Nick Morton, a soldier moonlighting as a tomb raider in Iraq. After stumbling upon the tomb of an ancient Egyptian nasty named Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), he winds up on a plane with the mummy, some soldiers, and a mysterious woman named Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis).

The plane crashes, and then the weirdness begins, with Nick surviving the crash due to being possessed by Ahmanet. Post-crash Ahmanet starts sucking face with cops and dead guys, turning them into a zombie army as she marches on London. Along the way, Nick meets Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe) in a subplot so freaking unnecessary it’s maddening.

Jekyll is here because he’s part of Universal’s new “Dark Universe” scheme, an attempt to Marvel-size the classic Universal monsters into some sort of connected, ongoing series. What a seriously stupid mistake this is. Nothing connects these monsters other than their original gothic origins, so trying to make them modern stand-ins for Iron Man and the Hulk is a joke. And, take it from me, Dr. Henry Jekyll is no Nick Fury.

Cruise is stuck laboring in this convoluted, yet sometimes almost entertaining, mess. The film starts with a blast as Nick and his sidekick Chris (Jake Johnson) uncover the tomb, then run into trouble on that plane. The subsequent plane crash is thrilling, scary stuff, and the attempt to turn Jake Johnson into something akin to Griffin Dunne in An American Werewolf in London has potential.

Alas, the movie cheeses out, and becomes more concerned with being the start of something big rather than just being a grand achievement unto itself. Director Alex Kurtzman plays it safe with the scares—scares that have potential but reek of PG-13 confinement. Had he gone for something more in the spirit of the Evil Dead series, increasing the scares, gore, and raunchy laughs, part of the premise here could’ve been a lot of fun.

What we wind up with is a film that is afraid of itself, and so unfocused you’ll check out in the second half.

Too bad. Ahmanet makes for a compelling monster, and I prefer her mummy to the one running around in those hackneyed Brendan Fraser efforts. Wallis is equally good as the woman with a few secrets, and Johnson is funny when he’s allowed to be.

Cruise is Cruise, and if you are a fan, that’s a good thing. He holds his own for most of the flick, but the script lets him down in the end with a terrible finale. It’s as if Kurtzman and his screenwriters had something nice and bleak—hey, it’s supposed to be a horror film! Things can end badly!—and then they just had to shoot for something happier. The final moments feel tacked on.

Seriously, Universal wants this to be a Universe like Marvel and DC? Maybe the sympathetic vampires of Twilight have them thinking audiences will accept Dracula as a hero? I doubt it. First off, Dracula will always sound and be nasty, and many moviegoers frown upon bloodsuckers, even the Twilight ones.

Johnny Depp is supposed to play the Invisible Man, and Javier Bardem is signed on for Frankenstein’s Monster? What, are they going to join hands and solve crimes together? Pull the plug on this plan, now, and just make good standalone monster movies. Kurtzman has made a messy film, but he’s not totally to blame. This is a movie in service of a franchise idea, and it feels like it’s being force injected down our throats.

Abandon the Dark Universe, and, please, no more of Russell Crowe’s Jekyll and Hyde act. It’s nonsense. Ω

“Who you calling Four Eyes?”

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3Alien: Covenant Ridley Scott’s third Alien film is an entertaining mashup of the overreaching but cool sensibilities from Prometheus and the old-school ick factor and dread that marked the original. Alien: Covenant continues the ruminations about the origins of mankind birthed in Prometheus while injecting a few more Xenomorphs into the mix. It will please those fans of the first two films of the franchise who want the shit scared out of them, while also appeasing those who enjoyed the brainy ways of Prometheus. While Scott has leaned harder on the horror elements for this one, his budget is more than $30 million less than the one he had for Prometheus. That film constituted one of cinema’s all-time great uses of 3-D technology. Covenant totally abandons 3-D and features some CGI in the opening minutes that look befitting of a low budget Syfy channel offering. The film more than makes up for it once the crew members of the Covenant, a stricken colony ship in danger of not reaching its destination, set down to scout out a new planet as a closer alternate. They encounter Prometheus survivor David (Michael Fassbender), who has basically been up to no good. Fassbender also plays a new android named Walter, and he more than capitalizes on the chance to do something weird with this acting opportunity. There’s plenty of old school scares and gore to go with the musings about Earth’s creation.

4It Comes at Night Writer-director Trey Edward Shults, who made a splendid debut with last year’s family drama Krisha, goes for a family drama of the post-apocalyptic kind with this thriller falsely billed as a horror movie. Paul (Joel Edgerton), a man living in a remote house with his wife and kid (Carmen Ejogo and Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) will go to every extreme to protect his family from a plague that has claimed the majority of Earth’s population. If somebody gets sick in his home, it’s a bullet to the head and a post-mortem visit to the fire pit. With that possibility always at hand, he allows a new couple (Christopher Abbott and Riley Keough, grandchild of Elvis) and their child to move in after they earn his trust with some livestock. Things go well for a short amount of time, before paranoia kicks in and the fire pit looms. Edgerton is magnificent here, as is the rest of the cast. The marketing makes this look like some sort of zombie movie, but it’s more drama than horror, although it is very much on the dark side. Shults is a true talent who doesn’t play by the rules. He’s off to one of the better director starts of recent memory, and he’s only going to get better. If you are looking for zombie fun, watch The Walking Dead. This one is about families behaving badly. It aims to mess with your head, and succeeds.

4Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 The trippy Marvel fun continues with this big, nutty, spiraling sequel that brings the fun, along with a lot of daddy issues. Star-Lord, a.k.a. Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), had some major mommy issues in the first movie, and this time out his dad takes a turn at messing with his head. The dad comes in the form of Ego (Kurt Russell—yes!), who we see hanging out with Quill’s mom in the ’70s during the film’s prologue. (The CGI and practical makeup anti-aging effects on Kurt Russell ranks as one of the best examples of that particular trick.) After a killer opening credits sequence, the Guardians—including Quill, Baby Groot (voice of Vin Diesel), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Drax (David Bautista) and Rocket (voice of Bradley Cooper)—find themselves on another quest. They are quickly diverted to Ego’s planet, where Quill finds out more about his celestial origins. Russell proves to be perfectly cast as Quill’s bombastic father, with Pratt possessing many of the legendary action film star’s alluring traits. Seeing them on screen together, at one point playing catch with an energy ball Quill conjures with newfound powers, is one of the film’s great joys. But ecause writer-director James Gunn isn’t going to settle for an easy story about a wayward son reuniting with a dream dad. 1 Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales In the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, a bunch of pirates run around and act like dicks while being pursued by ghosts. If my memory serves me right, that is basically the plot of all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The new one, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales rehashes the same plot, with Johnny “The Whore” Depp doing his whole drunken Keith Richards pirate routine again as Jack Sparrow. Actually, his Keith Richards routine has devolved into something more akin to Dudley Moore in Arthur 2: On the Rocks. I reference the Arthur sequel, for the original was somewhat funny, but the gag got real tired in part two. So it goes with Depp’s meandering, mumbling, tipsy performance as Jack Sparrow, the feared pirate that everybody in the world seems to have some sort of beef with. He’s laboring with a joke that stopped being funny four movies ago. This time out, a new legion of undead sailors is after Jack due to his having a compass that can lead them back to the land of the living, or some bullshit like that. The band of dead sailors is led by Captain Salazar (Javier Bardem), some dude who was trying to rid the world of pirates in his living days, but wound up a cursed ghost under the sea. While Salazar’s villain has his good, creepy moments, he can’t save this dreck.

4The Survivalist Martin McCann plays a character simply listed as Survivalist in the credits, a man living on a small piece of land in a post-apocalyptic world where food has grown scarce. It’s a lonely existence, but he has a crop to get by, and it’s all for him. That is, until a mysterious woman (Olwen Fouere) and her daughter (Mia Goth) show up looking to barter for food. After he refuses their offer of pumpkin seeds, Survivalist accepts the offer of sleeping with the daughter, and then things get a little complicated. Writer-director Stephen Fingleton has made a film that is relentlessly dark, and his film has next to nothing good to say about human beings. (Hey, the human race needs a good smackdown sometimes, am I right?) McCann is highly memorable as a nervous man who yearns for companionship but trusts no one. Fouere is the right touch of nasty as somebody who has been hardened by the apocalypse. Goth plays the film’s most sympathetic character, yet even she is a schemer with nefarious intentions. This is a film that aims to bum you out, and succeeds. I say this as a compliment (Available for download on iTunes and Amazon. com during limited theatrical release.)

4Wonder Woman The DC Universe gets the blast of fun it sorely needed with a film that gets it right on almost every front, and features a performance from Gal Gadot that makes it seem the role was her birthright. Gadot lights up the screen and commands the camera on a level with Christopher Reeve and Robert Downey, Jr., in past films of the superhero genre. She simply is Wonder Woman to the extent that I can’t picture another actress ever even attempting to play the character again. She owns it. It’s hers. Game over. There’s always that faction of fans who bitch about superhero origin stories, wanting these films to jump straight to the hardcore action, but I love a good superhero origin story done well, and this is one of them. The movie starts with young Amazonian princess Diana running around in her island paradise, practicing her fight moves and yearning to be trained as a warrior. After butting heads with her sister Antiope, Diana’s mother, Hippolyta, relents, and allows Antiope to train Diana, as long as she doesn’t tell her about the true powers she possesses. For those who don’t know the Wonder Woman back story—I was a little rusty on it myself—it’s a sweet little piece of mythology and mystery, and director Patty Jenkins (the Charlize Theron Oscar vehicle Monster) perfectly paces all the revelations. It says a lot that Gadot and Jenkins make you feel good in a movie that has its share of violence and villainy in it.