Mummy, Please Take Me Home:Movie Review

Starring: Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Annabelle Wallis

Directed by: Alex Kurtzman

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If you are a fan of Tom Cruise—who is incidentally the biggest star of this planet even now—or the Mummy franchise you would know what to expect from  this film. And it is certainly not the languorous luminosity of  Ritesh Batra’s The Sense Of An Ending. Nor for that matter, the vacuous brazen ‘bimboism’ of Baywatch.

Like Zac Efron in Baywatch  Tom Cruise also  has a scene in the morgue with a penis. Only this time Cruise is the corpse and the sex organ is his own.

The truth  about the Mummy lies somewhere in-between Captain  Fantastic and Baywatch. It intellectualizes the cheap horror tricks of the Egyptian tombs erupting into a banshee of terror, but only to the point where the ghouls sucking the life out of their victims do not appear to be  anything more than a grotesque manifestation of  evil.

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Many parts of The Mummy with the evil creatures rushing at striking speed  for their victims mouth for  a suck truck, resemble the zombie ‘B’ movies from Hollywood with outstanding special affects to raise  the bar. Cruise, looking 30 at 50, still conveys the charisma  and  agility of a full-blown matinee idol who doesn’t quite understand  how to  combat the forces that take control of his life.

It’s a  one-note performance in a fun-note film. Not  be taken seriously ,certainly not for its politics. Cruise and his entertaining partner-in-crime Jake Johnson play antique thieves who run into a scam far beyond their control.In the beginning they are rescued from their roguish shenanigans in Iraq by American mercenary soldiers  in a crackdown that can given the Pentagon nightmare for weeks.

The one-line plot stretches into two hours of frenetic fun filled with self-deprecatory humour and a tongue-in-cheek reverence for the ‘Mummy’   franchise which has over the years acquired the sustained silliness of  a childish prank played on unsuspecting adults,the kind that a Dubai television channel played on Shah Rukh Khan recently where he was trapped in a desert cavity and attacked by  a ‘dinosaur’ which  turned out be a man dressed in  a fake animal suit.

Well,ha  ha to that. And ho ho to Tom Cruise’s scary-only-if-you-believe-in-fairy  tale which slams  a tenner  in terms of tempo and tension. The chase scenes are excellent. Cruise’s two female co-stars are a sturdy if somewhat shallow study in contrasts.While Annabelle Wallis is the proper almost asexual academician( she does claim to have had very ineffectual sex with Cruise’s character, though) the fascinating Sofia Boutella is  the yummy Mummy reborn to finish her unfinished mating business with Mr Cruise.

You really can’t take this re-b(h)oot seriously. It’s meant to be fun, pacey, exhilarating and  finally gratuitous. Director Kurtzman preserves an  even pace that flags only with the entry of the Russell Crowe character.

But that’s another story.