The mummy - 2017

Well, it is entertaining, quite enough to stay seated till the end of the movie. 

But...

There are a few problems with this movie: 
1.it’s called the mummy but there are only like 20 minutes of scenes with mummies and the title-character actually looks like a sexy-walking half-naked girl more than a mummy... 
2. Annabelle Wallis, that I’ve never seen before and here plays Jenny, the hero’s sort-of-romantic-interest, is terrible, absolutely terrible, flat face and flat (and a bit annoying) voice. There’s only one decent scene at the end, when she looks at him without speaking a word, everything else is unbearable. 
3. Tom Cruise should really accept the fact that he was born in 1962 and not 1982, and leave this kind of roles to actors in their 30s. For good. Please. This role was embarrassing. And let’s just draw a veil over Crowe’s line “you are a younger man..”, which continued saying something like have respect, or beware, us older men... I mean seriously? It’s not like there are 30 years between them! I’m sorry to break this news to him, but Cruise doesn’t look like a kid anymore. He looks very handsome for his age, indeed he does, I’ll give him that, but there’s nothing he can do to avoid looking over-50 (let’s just hope he won’t go hard on plastic surgery, because that inevitably changes facial features and if he loses the Tom-Cruise-smile then it’d be the end). 
4. The Ahmanet character was not bad after all, but it was more than annoying the fact that the whole plot revolved around her wish to summon Seth into this world, and she needed a man’s body to do so; first thing first, two female characters in this movie and one is a plain save-me-please blonde and the other is supposed to be an all-powerful thousands-years-old tough-girl-badass, and yet she also revolves entirely around two male figures, the one she wants to bring to life and the one she needs to do it. Why did she need them so badly? Why did she need Set in the first place? She herself had killed her father and his new wife and son, so what did she need Set for? That was really annoying :-/   Ok, they say the pact with Seth was not complete, she had to finish it... for some reason. It is not really clear what the plan was, exactly. To bring Seth in a mortal's body and be at his side as his Queen, I guess... another case of 'he would have the power and she would be at his side, looking sexy and supportive'... not exactly seeking the power for herself...
5. If you have a character called Jekyll (yes, ‘that’ Jekyll) you obviously expect him to turn into Hyde at some point, and when he finally does... it’s such a disappointing scene, a little fight and the hero wins... and that’s it! They showed us big security measures, great fear and everything, and then we only got to see a simple fight between two men... Hyde was a bit stronger but alas also dumb. 
So yeah, this movie was a bit of a disappointment. Cruise’s performance wasn’t bad per se, but he played his usual hero-character, his usual scoundrel-good-inside, the usual decorated-soldier, it’s the same thing we’ve seen him do lots of times, so yeah, he kinda acts on autopilot. But he was still not a good choice for the role, which was essentially written like a 30-something man... At 55 the usual playboy-who-doesn’t-want-to-grow-up theme is simply embarrassing. 
I liked Russell Crowe and Sofia Boutella though, although their roles are marginal, it’s all about Cruise and the blonde who follows him around like a puppy.
The Nick Morton character (played by Cruise) is absurd from the start. He’s a soldier in Iraq but apparently goes wherever he wants doing whatever he wants, and basically forces his friend Vail to go with him (or stay behind in the desert without water, what a nice guy). He’s had a one-night stand with Jenny (Wallis) and left after stealing her map leading to a place marked something like danger or curse, and to him that means that there’s a treasure, so he wants to go and steal it. What a nice guy. 
They get into trouble but are helped by the arrival of Colonel Greenway (Courtney B. Vance, unfortunately his role is the shortest of all, he gets killed after a couple of scenes) and his men. Jenny also arrives angry about the theft, and they discover what appears to be a tomb but she rightly assumes that it’s in fact a prison. A spider bites Vail, which will lead later to him being controlled by Ahmanet - presumably, although she’s still a mummy inside a sarcophagus - but it’s not 100% clear why Nick frees the sarcophagus itself from its pool of mercury. He has a vision of Ahmanet.. does she have powers already, even though she’s still imprisoned? Because if she has, why didn’t she manage to control someone before? It may be a desert, but in thousands of years someone is bound to have been around the place at some point. 
They take the sarcophagus to London, and Vail kills Greenway and is himself killed by Nick. 
Birds attack the plane making it crash. Nick saves Jenny and then crashes with the plane, but he’s been chosen by Ahmanet for her ritual that will bring Set back to life into his body, so he doesn’t die, he comes back to life while in the morgue - and they simply give him back his clothes and let him go out free... just like that...
Nick talks to Vail’s ghost from time to time, and Vail explains to him that he’s been cursed. Ahmanet escapes from the sarcophagus and immediately kills some workers to suck their life energy and become all sexy again, then she sends her new zombie/mummies against Nick.. not too clear why since she doesn’t want him dead, she wants him with her so she can complete her ritual, but of course they escape.
Since that vision in the prison-tomb, Ahmanet is now into Nick’s mind, and he finds himself in a church where Ahmanet apparently wants to perform her ritual only to discover at the last moment that her dagger is missing the precious gem without which the ritual won’t work. A big red gem at the end of an otherwise all-black dagger, and she hadn’t noticed until the blade was almost touching his body... any person of any gender, any age, any nationality, would have noticed right away that the big precious gem essential for the ritual was missing...
They are rescued by some men, working for Prodigium, a secret agency working to study and contain supernatural evils. The leader is Dr Jekyll (Crowe), who right away tells us his story in a few words for no apparent reason : he got ill and this disease consisted in an “unquenchable thirst for chaos and the suffering of others” and found a cure for himself, but not a permanent one, he has to inject himself with it every time to prevent Hyde from coming out. 
Prodigium keeps Ahmanet prisoner, filling her body with mercury with the intent to study her afterwards - but of course she will free herself later. 
Ahmanet warns Jenny that Jekyll will kill Nick as other men before had killed her chosen one, and Jenny confronts Jekyll about this. Jekyll admits it, saying that there’s no way to stop the curse, and they must protect the rest of humanity. Nick is not pleased with this plan, and takes away his serum from him. Jekyll’s man takes Jenny out but Nick is too late and is trapped inside with Hyde. Jenny fights the guy in order to run to Nick’s rescue - basically doing nothing because he helps himself, when Hyde brings him close to the desk where the serum is and Nick uses it on him to bring Jekyll back. 
Jenny and Nick run away, planning on destroy the gem in order to stop the curse - easy:no gem no ritual no curse, really a no brainer, and yet it had been carefully preserved all those years...
Of course Ahmanet gets hold of both dagger and gem before them, and she summons some zombie/mummies to fight them. Jenny is drowned. Ahmanet tries to convince our hero to join her and accept the great power that the ritual will give him, but he steals again the dagger and tries to break the gem, but then she tells him that he’ll have power of life over death and he looks at Jenny’s lifeless body and doesn’t break the gem, instead he uses it to stab himself. He gets Set’s powers, sucks Ahmanet’s life energy away, reducing her to a powerless mummy, and then brings back Jenny. Then he hides from her, telling her that he doesn’t know what he is now, that he could be dangerous, and then he goes away alone. 
She discusses him with Jekyll, wondering if he’ll be their greatest ally or if he’ll succumb to his evil powers. 
The last scene shows us that Nick resurrected Vail - only to have him follow him around like at the beginning, so it’s not really a good-deed, he basically didn’t want to be alone and created a little slave for himself.
The two of them leave for a new adventure, whatever that might be.

Now, was Nick possessed by Ahmanet or not? During the movie there are various long-stares between them, and yet Nick always acted on his own - but for the two scenes when he freed her from the mercury in the tomb and when he found himself at the church where she wanted to perform her ritual - by the way, why a church??? She’s from before-Church-times, and anyway she didn’t need a sacred place back then (she tried to murder her lover on her bed) why should she need it now?
Why the long stares then? 
All those words about what kind of man he was, so boring: “somewhere in there I know you’re a good man”... yawn, yeah we figured that too, we didn’t see him being decorated, but we saw him saving her life, so what else could she think?  She says that she knows it because he gave her the only parachute, but he wonders because he says that he thought there was another one... was that suppose to make us doubt too? I mean, not only he’s the hero, but he gave her the parachute first, right away, he didn’t go: this is for me, now let’s look for one for you... I don’t know, but if the idea was really to make us wonder what side would he choose, it was a poor useless attempt, nobody would believe that he’d side with the mummy, not even for a second.
Anyway, seeing Jenny’s body Nick gains control over Set, so the ritual didn’t bring Set to life, basically it only gave Nick Seth’s powers...
I wonder, would it have been the same if Jenny had been safe elsewhere and he had seen instead the dead bodies of all the poor guys fighting for Good that got killed by Ahmanet’s army? Would that sight have been enough to raise some human empathy in him or he’d have thought ‘I can’t sleep with them so why should I care?’ - just wondering. 

Also, not even the slightest doubt of conscience over the fact that these characters went to Iraq, found and therefore took (stole?) what was there and they brought it home without knowing what it was, causing the death of many people?