22 - The Mummy (June 2017)

Ah, The Mummy... sacred, ancient, cinema-treasure of a bygone childhood. While I doubt anyone who saw Tom Cruise's effort at the property when they were nine years old will look back with the same level of nostalgia upon the 2017 version as we do the 1999 edition, we're pleased to say this effort wasn't a total loss! We went into this expecting that watching it would be like going to the video store to rent Transformers and ending up popping the crappy knock-off Transmorphers into the DVD player instead. Yes, we're in our thirties and remember things like "DVDs" and "video stores." And yes, Transmorphers was a legit movie. Save for the down-your-throat exposition, the late-to-the-game character reveal that will confuse the uninitiated, and the fact that 48% of this movie's script was allocated to the ambition of a cinematic universe that never went anywhere—this movie is not a complete and utter waste of time. What you get is a crappy Tom Cruise film... but in the same way that "there's no such thing as bad pizza," there's something oddly satisfying about getting "Cruisified", no matter how low on the list it is. Perhaps the one big criticism we did agree with is that the movie just... lacks a little heart. Maybe they should've left that organ intact when they mummified this project, am I right?!? [email protected]