The Mummy  (2017)

els – 6.0/10

IMDb– 5.5/10

Amazon – 3.0/5 stars

Rotten Tomatoes Critics – 4.2/10

Rotten Tomatoes Audience – 2.8/5

Directed by: Alex Kurtzman

Written by: David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, Dylan Kussman, Jon Spaihts,        Alex Kurtzman, Jenny Lumet

Produced by: Sarah Bradshaw, Sean Daniel, Genevieve Hofmeyr, Alex Kurtzman, Chris Morgan

Music by: Brian Tyler

Cast: Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Annabelle Wallis, Russell Crowe

The Egyptian God Set, possibly the really bad guy in this installment of mummy movies, is a god of the desert, storms, chaos, violence, sometimes a good guy; brother to Osiris, Isis, and Nephthys; husband of Nephthys; father of Anubis: generally an unfathomable god useful to script writers when an all-purpose villain, or hero, is needed.

Set needs to occupy a human form to realize his full potential, eventually settling on Morton (Cruise) for that honor: before that occurs though, a little background. The movie begins apace, slightly slower than that actually, from a pact Set made with a pharos’ daughter Ahmanet (Boutella), he gets to be a god in human form and she gets to be a pharos, which is a god in human form; but the pact is discovered and fails, since the movie needs a plot; forthwith she is killed, mummified, and buried far away from Egypt in Mesopotamia.  Enter Morton, a little closer to present day, who is in Iraq for a war or something, who discoveries the tomb of Ahmanet, ships it off to London to pair it up with some old artifacts; ostensibly to keep the plot from freezing up.  After a few twists and turns, Dr. Jekyll (Crowe) materializes to assist with the coming climatic scenes.

The critics, and the audiences, have panned this movie mercilessly, but what I saw was a fairly decent B action movie with some fair attempts at humor.  Cruise has taken the brunt of the critical abuse; such as being too old for action movies, much in the same vein as Harrison Ford’s last Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull; the credibility to perform the action stunts is strained.  Cruise plays a brash, in it for himself, unsympathetic character, which critics felt wasn’t a plausible part for him; maybe, but it worked in Top Gun.  The best line in the movie occurred when the plane carrying Morton and his conquest, Halsey (Wallis), is approaching the ground, burning, at more than safe angles and speed; in which Morton gives the only parachute to Halsey, pushes her out of the plane, and saves her life.  Morton crashes with the plane, but survives.  Later Halsey thanks Morton for magnanimously giving her the only parachute, at which he sheepishly replies, “I thought there were two”.

This is a better movie than what the critics have told you.