By George Haerle

For The Daily World

The most recent rendition of Universal Studios’ “The Mummy” was supposed to be some kind of kicking-off point for its Dark Universe, in which new versions of its classic monsters — Dracula, the Wolfman, etc. — are introduced via their own movies, building up to a culmination where all of them will meet in some kind of showdown or team up a la “The Avengers.”

Let’s hope not.

“The Mummy” is one of the worst movies this reviewer has ever seen. Ever. Where to start? That’s not an easy question in the context of this heap of molten garbage. There is nothing redeemable about this movie. The performances are phoned in, the pacing is wonky, the script was most likely fished out of the bottom of a producer’s wastebasket, the characters are awful and unrelatable, and the action scenes are so poorly thought-out and choreographed, you’d think a middle-schooler wrote the movie as monster fan fiction.

Tom Cruise’s character is a piece of garbage who is only interested in thieving artifacts and getting rich, and this results in a cursed, ancient tomb being opened. Cruise doesn’t belong in this movie, and I’m not sure how they got him to do something like this that is so unworthy of his talents. He’s just a bore here, with no real personality or redeeming qualities save for the last 10 minutes of the movie.

But it’s with the introduction of the female co-lead, played by Annabelle Wallis, that the movie reaches into the cinematic canopic jar and throws a rancid pile of mummified remains into the audience’s face, making it clear that neither the writers nor director Alex Kurtzman cares about the viewers’ intelligence.

Wallis enters the screen slapping Tom Cruise, and the first thing she goes off on — in the middle of Iraq, where this ancient tomb has been blown open by a cluster bomb — is about their bedroom antics. Her character feels like something we would have gotten from a schlocky Stallone flick from the 1980s: a blonde bimbo who’s only there to scream, explain everything to an audience the filmmakers don’t respect, and be saved by the macho lead. Are we still doing this, Hollywood? Really?

The movie hops around tonally (a sign of five too many writers on a film — “The Mummy” has six) as much as it does from set piece to set piece, using hallucinations and/or screen blackouts to have Cruise constantly space out and wake up in other locations, rather than anything organically flowing to progress the story at a fitting pace.

It continues this nonsense by needlessly and shamelessly ripping off Universal’s own “The Mummy” (1999) as well as “An American Werewolf in London” by introducing a ghost friend (Jake Johnson) who follows Cruise around with no real contribution to the plot or story.

Halfway through, the characters suddenly wind up in some secret facility that apparently hunts and terminates monsters. It’s run by Dr. Henry Jekyll — Russell Crowe’s worst character performance to date.

Dr. Jekyll is apparently the Dark Universe’s equivalent of Marvel’s Nick Fury. When he inevitably turns into Mr. Hyde — ugh. Crowe’s face is just altered digitally to a dead gray hue and he suddenly develops a Cockney accent, with all of the arm-swinging acting talent of a male orangutan gone bananas during mating season.

Princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) could have been a great villain in a much better “Mummy” movie. However, she’s unseen in a sarcophagus for the first 40 minutes or so, then trying to have undead relations with Cruise for the next 20, then is chained up in the monster facility for another 20. She escapes by making a spider crawl into a guy’s ear, and then the movie reuses the giant sand face from the much better 1999 film.

In the final act, Ahmanet just stands there trying to convince Cruise to join her in her quest of world domination. There is no real final battle, no climactic throwdown or even any form of tension-building finale. Tom Cruise gets thrown across an old tomb a couple times, and pretty much just defeats the mummy by taking her magical knife.

Yes, the ending has about as much substance as a bowl of soggy cornflakes, and nonsensically implies the beginning of this Dark Universe that should never happen. To perhaps be entombed in a coffin with live scarabs, dropped in a hole and sunk in a pool of mercury for the rest of eternity, never to be found again — one could only hope.

Were the writers just a group of chimps thrown into a room with some typewriters? Because that would be the only scenario where this movie gets a pass. Enter only if you dare, because you may not be able to distinguish between the groans coming from the audience and those of the scuttling mummified corpses on the screen.

***

“The Mummy” is currently playing at the Riverside Cinemas, 1017 S. Boone St. in Aberdeen.

George Haerle holds a bachelor’s degree in creative writing for media and lives in Cosmopolis.