WhileTom Cruisehas certainly possessed the tangible qualities that are required for superstardom, the enduring nature of Cruise’s stardom is also attributable to Cruise’s keen Hollywood instincts and his absolute insistence on applying quality control to every aspect of his career.
Cruise has worked with virtually every great filmmaker from the past forty years, from Martin Scorsese to Oliver Stone to Stanley Kubrick to Steven Spielberg, and while Cruise has certainly had disappointments, Cruise’s film failures almost always reflect a star who is trying to do too much, never too little.
In this context, 2017’sThe Mummyrepresents an appalling anomaly in Cruise’s career. Incoherent, sloppy, and technically incompetent,The Mummyrepresents a complete abdication of the principles that have guided Cruise’s career since his star-making appearance inRisky Business.
Moreover, the ultimate effect ofThe Mummyis that of morbid fascination, both in terms of the film itself and the genuine mystery of how, and why, Cruise became attached to, and would allow his reputation to be tarnished by, such a grievous cinematic travesty.
A Hired Gun Takes Cruise Control
InThe Mummy, Tom Cruise plays Nick Morton, a United States Army Sergeant and a soldier of fortune who accidentally discovers the ancient tomb of Ahmanet, an entombed Egyptian princess who was mummified alive by Egyptian priests after trying to summon the deity Set, a god in ancient Egyptian religion.
Although Tom Cruise’s production company, TC Productions, was attached toThe Mummy, unlike the majority of Cruise’s films over the past twenty-five films, Cruise wasn’t a credited producer onTheMummy, although the amount of control that Cruise wielded overThe Mummyeventually far surpassed that of the beleaguered Alex Kurtzman, the film’s credited director.
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Cruise, who was reportedly paid $11 million forThe Mummy, far below Cruise’s long-established $20 million per-film salary, “oversaw” the film’s major action sequences and essentially managed the overall production, wresting control from Kurtzman, who made his feature directorial debut with the small-scale 2012 drama filmPeople Like Usand had previously directed episodes of various television shows, such asAlias,Fringe, andSleepy Hollow.
Obviously, Kurtzman, who later describedThe Mummyas beingthe worst failure of his life, was unprepared to handle the demands of a would-be blockbuster film likeThe Mummy, which almost certainly would have benefitted from having a more experienced director, asThe Mummy, with its jarring inconsistency of narrative and visual tone, is a poorly-directed film with shoddy technical credits that belie the film’s mammoth production cost.
What Exactly Is The Mummy Trying to Be?
AlthoughThe Mummywas released as an action-adventure film with fantasy elements, the film itself represents a mishmash of tone, as the genres of comedy, horror, and even science fiction are introduced and then withdrawn at various times throughout the film, sometimes within individual scenes.
Eschewing the campiness of the Brendan Fraser-starring trilogy ofMummyfilms, the 2017 film seems to be most intent on being a horror film but is too derivative and inconsistent in tone to be frightening. Moreover,The Mummylacks the basic sense of fun that defines the Brendan FraserMummyfilms, which are also much more engaging and technically impressive than the 2017 film.
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The chaotic narrative and tone ofThe Mummyis plainly visible through Tom Cruise’s character, Nick Morton, who, after unwittingly bringing Ahmanet back to life, is visited by the ghost of a dead fellow soldier who was possessed by Ahmanet, flees from Ahmanet and her army of zombies, encounters Dr. Henry Jekyll, along with Jekyll’s monstrous Eddie Hyde alter-ego, runs from an Ahmanet-created sandstorm in London, and becomes possessed by the deity Set after stabbing himself with a mystical dagger that seemingly offers the wielder the power to resurrect the dead.
Unlike almost all of Cruise’s film characters, and certainly unlike Fraser’s Rick O’Connell character, Nick Morton functions more as an automaton, an amalgam of genre archetypes, than a real person. There’s no sense of history with Nick Morton, who rather seems to exist solely to be deployed in a contrived, silly, uninspired film like this.
Tom Cruise’s Most Embarrassing Film (And Performance)
Tom Cruise was fifty-four years old whenThe Mummywas released, and his appearance in the film inspired real speculation regarding whether it was time for Cruise to start acting his stage, so to speak, in terms of following the lead of Harrison Ford, and other aging Hollywood superstars, and transition to playing character-based roles.
Indeed, it is sometimes painful to watch Cruise inThe Mummybehave as if he’s oblivious to his age by attempting to maintain, or recreate, the cocky-young-hero trope that was intended for Cruise’s young daredevil persona fromDays of ThunderandTop Gunbut simply elicits feelings of nostalgia inThe Mummy, like watching a faded high school star who has failed to adjust to life after high school.
More than any other point in Cruise’s career over the past forty years, the commercial and critical failure ofThe Mummysuggested that Cruise’s time as a Hollywood superstar might be nearing an end, as the release ofThe Mummywas bracketed by the disappointing performances of 2016’sJack Reacher: Never Go Backand 2017’sAmerican Made. More broadly, prior toThe Mummy, beyond theMission: Impossibleseries, Cruise hadn’t had a genuine box office hit since 2005’sWar of the Worlds.
Now that2022’sTop Gun: Maverickhas brought Cruise to the very pinnacle of Hollywood superstar status, even above what he had at his previous peak,The Mummyis now an embarrassing footnote, a rare and shocking misstep for a star who rarely, if ever, makes the same mistake twice.
