The latest Honest Trailer from Screen Junkies is online and they're taking no prisoners this time - as they focus on The Mummy. The weekly satire of highlighted movies usually finds things to like and praise alongside the snarky remarks and often devastating put-downs. Films like Kong: Skull Island and Power Rangers have both had compliments thrown in along with the face-palm comments as part of their own Honest Trailers. However, the Tom Cruise-led Mummy is afforded no such luxuries and the film is pretty much mocked and picked apart from start to finish.
The Mummy was intended to set-up a new version of Universal's Dark Universe and pave the way for future versions of The Bride of Frankenstein and The Invisible Man. However, the film didn't perform well in U.S. theaters and earned generally poor reviews, before making some of its revenue back thanks to a decent showing at the global box office (where it passed the $400M mark). This means that a question mark hangs over the future of the Dark Universe, even though The Bride of Frankenstein still has a firm release date in place for 2019.
Related: The Mummy Director Uncertain About the Dark Universe's Future
All of this means that The Mummy is fair game for Screen Junkies - and in this episode of Honest Trailers, Epic Voice Guy doesn't waste a moment in throwing the first punch at the movie. "Experience the terror of a film without a soul", he booms, pretty much setting the tone for the remainder of the trailer. Epic Guy misses the fun of the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies from the 1990s, as well as the horror of the original 1930s Universal versions, but hates the action-movie clichés and perceived sloppiness of the 2017 iteration of the Mummy franchise. He also asks some legitimate questions about the film's storyline - like, why does Ahmanet need to make a deal with the devil to be able to kill 2 sleeping people and a baby?
Epic Guy saves some vitriol for The Mummy director Alex Kurtzman too, as he points out that Kurtzman also co-wrote the other failed cinematic universe launchpad, The Amazing Spider-Man 2. He also rips into the unusual lack of charm from Cruise's character, calling him a "home-schooled Indiana Jones", before settling on "Indiana Phones-it-in" for the usual "starring" section at the end of the trailer. As many reviews for The Mummy did, this Honest Trailer points out the the film emphasized setting-up a universe over telling a compelling story - and Epic Guy defines the Dark Universe as being a series that stars "guys in their 50's, fighting monsters from the 30's". Ouch. As a final twist of the knife, the film is re-named "Tom Cruise Runs from Sand: Featuring The Mummy", and its lack of genuine horror is none-too-subtly compared to the recent impact of Get Out and IT.
If you're a fan of The Mummy, this won't make comfortable viewing. Still, it's probably no worse than most reviews of the film and certainly echoes other opinions and suggestions for where The Mummy went wrong. Hopefully, all this feedback will inspire future entries in the Dark Universe to be more than just action-movie updates... assuming they still get made, of course.
NEXT: There Are Too Many Cinematic Universes
Source: Screen Junkies
