🏺 The Mummy (2017) Review

Lets start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?

🎥 Trailers

Since this is a Universal film, Yall know what that means? Cue the Universal Logo!

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📖 Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

This time, the mummy isn’t Imhotep but a high priestess named Ahmanet. Buried alive for her crimes, she awakens in the modern world when treasure hunters disturb her tomb. From there, chaos unfolds as she sets her sights on using Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) as a vessel for ultimate power. What could have been a gothic reimagining of a Universal classic instead turns into a confused blockbuster trying to be horror, action, comedy, and cinematic universe starter all at once.


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🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Character Rundown

Nick Morton (Tom Cruise): Our so-called hero. He’s not noble, he’s not charming, he’s just a smirking thief who robs ancient sites for profit. Impossible to root for.

Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella): The female mummy. Her motivations are scrambled — revenge, world domination, romance? The movie can’t decide.

Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis): Generic love interest, whose character depth begins and ends with “dating Nick Morton.”

Chris Vail (Jake Johnson): Nick’s buddy who dies early, only to return as a ghost sidekick. It’s a blatant rip-off of An American Werewolf in London.

Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde (Russell Crowe): Randomly shoved in as the “Nick Fury” of the Dark Universe, running an organization that studies monsters. He derails the story more than he adds to it.



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⏱️ Pacing / Flow

The film has no rhythm. It jerks between horror, adventure, Marvel-style quips, and awkward attempts at romance. By the third act, it doesn’t feel like a story anymore — it feels like Universal throwing ingredients into a blender hoping a cinematic universe will appear.


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✅ Pros

Sofia Boutella has presence as Ahmanet, even if the script fails her.

The plane crash sequence is competently staged.



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❌ Cons

Tom Cruise is miscast, unlikable, and completely wrong for this type of role.

Ahmanet’s motivations make no sense and constantly change.

The ghost-sidekick subplot rips off An American Werewolf in London.

The shoehorned Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde subplot turns this into a trailer for a franchise instead of a film.

CGI is bland, scares are nonexistent, and the ending is laughable.



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💭 Final Thoughts

This isn’t a horror story. It isn’t even a proper adventure. It’s a lifeless product designed to launch the “Dark Universe,” and it failed spectacularly. Instead of focusing on atmosphere or story, Universal stuffed the runtime with cinematic universe teases and Tom Cruise doing his usual running-through-explosions routine. By the end, it’s exhausting, incoherent, and utterly joyless.


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⭐ Rating

2/10 — Atrocious. Skip it. If you want a mummy film worth your time, watch Brendan Fraser’s 1999 version or go back to Boris Karloff’s 1932 classic.


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⚠️ Spoiler Warning ⚠️

🕵️ Spoilers

The film opens with Ahmanet’s backstory: denied her throne when her father had a son, she murders her family in a rage, then makes a deal with the god of death to gain power. Just when she achieves her goal, she decides out of nowhere that she also wants world domination. She’s captured, cursed, and mummified — then inexplicably shipped off to Iraq.

Enter Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) and his sidekick Chris. They loot ancient sites for cash until they stumble across Ahmanet’s tomb. Evelyn from the ’99 film opened a book; here, they yank a coffin out of a mercury pit and airlift it dangling from a helicopter. Naturally, this goes horribly wrong. Chris gets possessed and attacks his friends, the plane crashes after a swarm of crows destroys it, and Nick dies… only to pop back up alive and naked, because of course he does.

Ahmanet awakens and regains her power by kissing men to death and turning them into zombie servants. She wants to stab Nick with a magic dagger to let the god of death possess him — making Nick her chosen boyfriend/monster king. Meanwhile, Chris reappears as a ghost only Nick can see, urging him toward “destiny,” in a subplot that rips An American Werewolf in London almost beat for beat.

Then the movie hard-pivots into universe-building. Ahmanet gets captured by Dr. Jekyll, who runs Prodigium, a secret organization studying monsters. Yes, that Dr. Jekyll, played by Russell Crowe, who turns into Mr. Hyde for no reason other than “shared universe.” Tom Cruise has a fistfight with Hyde before escaping.

The climax takes place in London, because apparently every blockbuster needs a city-destroying set piece. Ahmanet summons a giant sandstorm with her face in it — a lazy rehash of the Brendan Fraser version. Nick’s love interest dies, cue zero emotional weight, and Nick decides the only way out is to stab himself with the dagger. He absorbs the god’s power, kills Ahmanet by kissing the life out of her (seriously), and resurrects his dead friend Chris. The movie closes by teasing sequels that will never happen.

This disaster tanked the “Dark Universe” before it even began. Universal scrapped all their plans — Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man, Javier Bardem as Frankenstein’s Monster — and pivoted to stand-alone reimaginings like 2020’s The Invisible Man, which actually succeeded.