The Mummy

Studio executives nowadays dream about doing away with writers and actors and directors and all the inconveniences of a business they have no idea at all about. The dream is of fully-computerized films devised in the boardroom, executed in the lab, and sent right out to marketing.

This is a prototype. It hasn’t done away with actors, only acting. The direction is rudimentary, but the real development of The Mummy is its script. This is how studio executives talk these days, and their conglomerate bosses, in their dreams (Warren Buffett, “it’s Buffet!”, therefore Brendan Fraser, “Frassiere!”)

Really, it seems the game they play at the studios is to see who can win corporate prestige by making the largest profit from the worst film, with nothing but marketing as a weapon, mano a mano with the world. That’s leadership. Sales leadership.

So much rumdum dialogue is singsung, yelled and grunted that you will think you’re at a cockfight or a cockatoo fight. Maybe it can be resold as a training manual for DIY FX.