Most movies wouldn’t be brave enough to kill off their main character in the first ten minutes of the film. This is precisely what happens in the Mummy – Nick gives the plane’s only parachute to the archeologist Jenny, before the plane crashes. Of course, given that the movie’s only just started, we know that Nick really can’t be dead when there’s still a story left to tell. When he wakes up in the morgue in a body bag, without a scratch on him, the question of his mind is the same one running through the audience’s head: what the hell is going on?
This movie boasts some good action scenes, such as Nick’s fight with Mr. Hyde as they’re both trapped in a room together, with the clash between the ancient evil and the evil that Dr. Jekyll and Jenny are trying to fight coming to head with the Mummy’s curse on Nick – by killing him, she will be able to resurrect the god of the dead, but first she must use her ancient powers to defeat to escape the modern prison holding her as she is slowly poisoned in mercury. This allows the movie to up its stakes, as Nick and Jenny must defeat the god of Set while trying to prevent the Mummy from wrecking havoc, but even though I felt like I was supposed to care, it was hard to keep my attention at times.
Although the film’s depiction of evil and its continuing search to defeat evil is a interesting storyline by itself, the relationships of the characters and their decisions often don’t do justice to it. Annabell Wallis’s Jenny, who serves as a love interest, is often left yelling after Tom Cruise and waiting for him to rescue her while she is left helpless. In fact, with her death, it seems that the main purpose her character serves is to act as motivation for Nick’s redemption in killing himself to stop Set in order to save her – she is only a vessel, and not really a flesh and blood character. This stands in stark contrast to the character of Evelyn Carnahan in the original Mummy franchise, who is a librarian shown to be both smart and capable of holding her own against Rick O’Connell, and she even saves herself from the Mummy by reading the spell that made him mortal again. Although Cruise is still charismatic as always, the writing of his character sometimes falls flat, as his relationship with Jenny is not given enough development and it is a little hard to believe that he would suddenly find his redemption and make the right choice after a lifetime of thievery.
When it comes to the character of the Mummy, I found Princess Ahmanet to be a much more fascinating villain than Priest Imoteph of the original trilogy – a figure consumed by revenge and hatred who only wanted what she saw was rightfully hers as daughter of the Pharaoh, creates conflict within the film, as I sometimes almost sympathized with her even though she was evil. One thing that the film could have elaborated on was the mythology of the gods, as I was a little confused as to why Ahmanet was so intent on resurrecting the Set in the body of her Chosen One when she had already fulfilled her revenge.
The film’s decision to merge the spirit of Set and Nick into one man in order to give him the power to resurrect Jenny leaves the ending open to make the way for a sequel and the establishment of a new franchise. Viewers are left wondering: is he now more man than monster? Although the resurrection of Nick’s friend Bale at the end of the film was a good thing, the idea of the power of life and death resting so easily in the hands of one man made me uneasy.
All in all, The Mummy raises some interesting questions on the idea of evil and resurrection, but a lot of the writing for the characters seemed flat and unbelievable. Gimme the original Mummy and it’s sequel over this movie, any day.