Honest trailers are definitely thrill-killers sometimes. But then again, so was The Mummy of 2017. Really, it was not that good. You went into the theater hoping to have your socks knocked off by a film that was supposed to be a revival of sorts, a hearkening back to the days when monster movies left people shaking when they left the theaters. Eventually you came out wondering if you’d just seen a two-hour long alternate version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
So the mummy is a woman now, not bad, not bad. She’s bent on ruling Egypt, her father marries and his wife has a new baby, which disrupts her plans to rule one day. Yeah, that’s bad. So what does a woman who’s about to be deposed as a baby do? Of course she goes and makes a pact with the god of death! There wasn’t anything such thing as child psychology back in the day so trying to work through her feelings involved more archaic and arcane methods than it did hugging her feelings out and trying to make her father understand how she felt.
I’m pretty sure that he, his wife, and yes, even the baby, got the gist of it when she killed them all. Yes, she killed the baby, gruesome I know but not altogether scary. Kids haven’t been off limits in films for a while now, though very few films will actually show that much happening to them. It’s always implied, which is bad enough.
But moving on. She gets caught eventually and is, you guessed it, cursed by her own people and locked away in a vault of liquid mercury that will keep her evil from being allowed into the world again, because mercury is the be-all end-all containment fluid for anything and everything evil. Well, at least it is in this film.
And then the years pass by in a blur and suddenly we’re in the modern day with a couple of guys with machine guns running from the bad guys while cracking wise with one another and just barely avoiding getting themselves killed. And of course when an explosion goes off in the desert-based village they’re in it uncovers a hidden cavern that hasn’t been accessed for hundreds upon hundreds of years, if not longer. And so what happens? You guessed it, they get to go down and investigate and in so doing they somehow release the most potent evil the world has ever seen.
And so of course the evil wakes up, summoning plagues left and right and keeping the main character alive since he’s the one she chose. Eventually she gets back up to her old tricks of killing, gaining power, and generally making life miserable for anyone that gets in her way. Even though the world had nothing to really do with the terms of her imprisonment she’s still set on showing the world just what she thinks of it by destroying everything she sees.
That means it’s up to the main character to find a way to defeat her, which means taking the power she has and kicking the living hell out of her just before sucking the life from her body. And so the lead character becomes the monster, but vows to use the power to do right.
Right. Sigh. Monster movies are just not what they used to be.
