The Honest Trailers team have taken on Universal’s The Mummy remake, a film whose failures have already inspired a hilarious Twitter summary from Gail Simone, pretty awful reviews from the critics, and a genius rewrite from you, the TMS readers. Originally intended to launch Universal’s “Dark Universe,” a cinematic universe built around the classic Universal monster movies, the movie might have just killed that franchise instead. Whoops!
“When Universal needed a cinematic universe,” the trailer begins, “they dug up the rotting, bloated corpse of…The Mummy.”
Honest Trailers calls this “a film without a soul,” criticizing its cliches and bland action-adventure plot, but their primary criticism is its blatant franchise mindset. The Mummy was meant to kick off “an action movie universe starring guys in their 50s fighting monsters from the ’30s,” and in order to serve that potential franchise, it included “its own version of Nick Fury, its own version of S.H.I.E.L.D, and its very own hall of spin-offs.” But the film as a whole still didn’t work, and for that the Honest Trailers team teases director Alex Kurtzman, saying, “When you want to murder a franchise by cramming it full of spin-off bait, you get the guy who did the exact same thing to Spider-Man.”
While I wish the trailer had focused a little more on The Mummy‘s tired white-dude-plunders-Egypt tropes, and the way this movie wasted its villain, I have to admit that the below summary really does capture things perfectly:
“Sit through this loose collection of studio notes masquerading as a single movie – that somehow manages to talk down to you while also being so vague and sloppy you don’t know what’s going on half the time – with one unholy purpose holding it together: make the Dark Universe happen.”
(Via /Film; image via Universal Pictures)
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