Film Review: FAST & FURIOUS PRESENTS: HOBBS & SHAW by Mike Sullivan

I won’t dispute that TANGO & CASH is a laughingstock. It’s an action movie that waddles towards the direction of parody but falls face first into a puddle of homoeroticism, prefers the puddle and lays there burbling out catty, tough guy one-liners while showing its finely toned ass to anyone willing to step over it. But is that really a bad thing? I ask because when the trailer for HOBBS & SHAW was released, many people compared it to TANGO & CASH, as if that was a terrible thing to equate it to. TANGO & CASH is basically an unconscious version of that live-action Troy McClure movie THE SIMPSONS’ writers wanted to make. There’s a car chase involving a dune buggy with monster truck wheels, a stripper who stops stripping in the middle of her act in order to perform a drum solo, a grenade is duct taped into someone’s mouth as a joke and Michael J. Pollard plays a crazy inventor! It’s excessive and stupid and probably one of the most entertaining action movies made in the past 40 years. Comparing HOBBS & SHAW to TANGO & CASH will have the opposite effect its naysayers intended. If you’re like me, you’ll walk into HOBBS & SHAW with such insanely high expectations you’ll only be able to walk away disappointed. So here’s a more accurate comparison, you know how McDonalds French fries are just appetizing enough to mitigate how disgusting they actually are? TANGO & CASH are McDonalds’ French Fries. HOBBS & SHAW are closer to the French fries at Burger King. You’ll eat it and it’s fine, you guess. But maybe the disgusting qualities slightly outweigh the appetizing ones? Maybe while you’re eating them you’re readily aware of how much better and different the onion rings with the zesty dipping sauce are -- which, in this tortured analogy, represent the FAST AND THE FURIOUS series. Basically what I’m trying to say is that I will eat my way through the kitchen of a Burger King until my heart explodes, coating everyone near me with the insouciant zing of Buffalo dipping sauce (the best dipping sauce at Burger King)!

In the same way that FRASIER was a spin-off of CHEERS, HOBBS & SHAW is a spin-off of the FAST & FURIOUS series. And much like FRASIER, the only time I’ll watch HOBBS & SHAW again is when I’m paralyzed by depression and trapped in a couch-based-fart prison of my own making. Now, before I go any further, I should point out that cyborgs and faceless, Dr. Klaw-like supervillains now exist within the universe of the FAST & FURIOUS series. Wasn’t this a movie about Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez stealing DVD players at one point? How is it possible that movies about really fast cars and “hot” outmoded home media players could comfortably fit within the Marvel Cinematic Universe if, for whatever reason, Disney acquired this franchise tomorrow? Imagine if RIVER’S EDGE turned into a franchise. Now imagine that what started as a film about troubled teens and the murder that affects their already fractured social circle, eventually morphs into a movie in which Crispin Glover, Dennis Hopper and Daniel Roebuck (as a ghost) travel around in a big rig killing river witches and swamp things. As stupid and jarring as the sight of a spectral Roebuck shooting lightning bolts at a witch in a paddleboat may seem, it still isn’t as jarring or stupid as the idea that the antagonist in HOBBS & SHAW is an evil cyborg (Idris Elba, who to be fair, is good in this) that performs dainty trick-riding stunts on a self-driving motorcycle.

Dwayne Johnson’s Luke Hobbs and Jason Statham’s Deckard Shaw were the breakout characters of the FAST & FURIOUS series. People loved their flirtatious tuff-talkin’ and sexually charged drop kicks to each other’s masculine but inviting Double D’s. More accurately, unlike the other characters in the series, Johnson’s And Statham’s on-screen presence couldn’t be summed up as “a cement block with a frowny face sharpie-d on the front of it” or ”five pork roasts and three frozen turkeys carefully balanced on top of each other in the driver’s seat of a muscle car.” No, it was closer to a convulsing QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT-style mutation of biceps, lats and smirks. It was terrifyingly arousing. Yet as much fun as it is to watch immovable beef dunes make cruel assumptions about the size of each other’s dicks, it’s hard to picture these tendony, bipedal Clydesdales getting their own spin-off buddy comedy. Especially when these hard-bosomed he-chunks are such thin wisps of characters.

As characters, Hobbs and Shaw are the Saturday morning cartoon versions of both actors’ public personas. Everything about them is broad, one-note and not well-defined. Even their jobs seem like vague afterthoughts. Hobbs is an FBI-ish agent-like lawman? I guess? While Shaw is Oscar the Grouch wrapped within Richard Kuklinski wrapped within a Calvin Klein underwear model? I think? There really isn’t much to these characters beyond the fact that one is very big and the other is comparatively less big. Pairing up characters without a personality in a genre that demands big, clashing personalities isn’t a great idea. A worse idea is pairing up characters without a personality and -- through a split screen montage -- declaring to your audience that, in spite of the fact that they consume eggs differently, there aren’t any noticeable differences between these quivering ab golems. In essence, they remade THE ODD COUPLE with two underwritten Oscars who take turns jabbing each other in the balls and asking if they enjoyed their “maple nut taps” for two hours and fifteen minutes.

But what this film lacks in compelling, realistic characters, it makes up in scenes where swollen, puffy men poke each other in the chest and verbally assault each other with random entries from 1001 Zany Insults and Silly Slams for Little Stinkers. Look, I may not be the best judge of action movie one-liners. To me, they don’t need to be clever, just memorable. The bar for good action movie zingers stands about as tall as Sylvester Stallone calling Rambo a “pussy” in TANGO & CASH. So, realistically, you’d have to dig four feet underground just to shimmy under this bar. HOBBS & SHAW effortlessly shimmies under that bar with its assortment of clichéd, public domain put-downs. At one point, a craggy living monument to the glory of Muscle Milk threatens to shove his boot so far up the ass of Statham that he’ll be “coughing up laces for a month.” We’re nearing the end of the second decade of the 21st century, don’t we deserve fresher, livelier tuff-talk? Why couldn’t their insults escalate until they reached a fever pitch of unchained homoeroticism? Why couldn’t Statham grab Johnson by his shirt, lean in closely and hiss, “Call me the cow because your ass is grass and I’m ready to graze?” Because, as it stands, the homoeroticism in HOBBS & SHAW could be far more homoerotic. Sure, Statham and Johnson flash flirty ‘fuck me’ eyes at each other while they punch through the faces of an endless succession of stuntmen. But we’re far from the sight of a nude Stallone peacocking his way through a prison for beefy, flagrantly glistening men in TANGO & CASH. I keep hearing complaints about how millennials are ruining everything with their SJW, gender-neutral sensitivity tendrils but if that’s the case, why are action movies less gay nowadays?

Yet, even as I was disappointed by the film’s resistance to basic characterization; tepid, barely there homoeroticism and the fact that Johnson and Statham make a pretty dire comedy team (It’s not Johnson’s fault, Statham can’t sell stupid dialogue the way his co-star can), I was impressed that HOBBS & SHAW managed to not just retain the stupidity of the FAST & FURIOUS franchise but take it into new thunderously dumb directions. For example, the plot revolves around Shaw’s sister (Vanessa Kirby, who like a cameoing Helen Mirren, is a bit too overqualified for this), injecting herself with an ill-defined nano-virus that liquefies organs. Eventually. Not right away. It takes several days and one exciting globetrotting adventure before your organs even start to soften, apparently. At any rate, Kirby does this in order to keep the virus out of the hands of a cybernetically enhanced Elba who, like the bad guys in ANGRY BIRDS 2, mostly exists in order to teach its protagonists the importance of cooperation. Of course, this barely there, afterthought of a plot exists only as a rickety framework to hang ridiculous stunts on such as a surreal FURY ROAD inspired sequence involving a helicopter and the tow truck equivalent to a Russian nesting doll. Let’s not forget the bizarre lengths the filmmakers go in order to justify the low-tech finale in which large Samoans beat Stormtroopers to death with wooden clubs. Evidently, Elba’s henchmen have guns that will not shoot without a decent wifi connection. It’s all very, goofy and absurdly unhinged. Yet, it’s never as much fun as it sounds.

Part of the reason why the FAST & FURIOUS franchise works is because as crazy as the films get, the tone is consistent. It’s not trying to laugh at itself, it doesn’t indulge in grating SHARKNADO levels of self-parody and its expansive almost Robert Altman-esque cast of characters insures we won’t hanging around any of these one-dimensional characters for very long. HOBBS & SHAW is tonally inconsistent. There’s something inharmonious about following up scenes of large men pointing at each other’s dicks and laughing as all the elephants at the San Diego Zoo are electrocuted (not actually a scene, but I’m hoping it appears in the sequel) with the cheesy earnestness of the FAST & FURIOUS’ “When You’re Here You’re Family” platitudes. The smaller cast also means we’re spending more time with the characters which seems like fun at first, but after twenty minutes you realize you would get a similar but more enjoyable experience by listening to "Shut Up, Little Man" over a loop of the Hindenburg exploding. I wouldn’t say that watching a movie like HOBBS & SHAW is like eating icing straight from the tube, mainly because it’s more like eating icing straight off the fist of someone who’s repeatedly punching you in the mouth. Which is to say it’s punishing, but not completely terrible.

Film review: DUMBO by Mike Sullivan

Did Tim Burton’s films always look like a leather jacket with a rockabilly Snow White airbrushed on the back? No, right? Yes? I don’t know anymore. Watching DUMBO makes you question everything about the director. Is he a talented visual artist with nothing left to say but isn’t above taking an easy paycheck? Did the oversaturation of THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS dilute his stylistic choices to such an overwhelming degree that now everything he does looks like off-brand Edward Gorey clip art? Were we so blinded by those once refreshing stylistic choices we never realized that the themes and messages of his films were never deeper than, “They laugh at me because I’m different. I laugh at them because they’re all the same?” Again, I don’t know because I’m afraid to know the real answer. Considering he now has a decade’s worth of loud, disposable, eye-searing, CGI-heavy Hollywood blockbusters to his name, I’m afraid the answer is that Burton has morphed into Michael Bay. Granted it’s a sexless, explosion-averse Michael Bay in a Robert Smith fright wig, but Burton’s films are no less headache-inducing or superficial. 

Even worse, because we now live in a world in which satire and its dumb, farting cousin parody are dead, Burton’s movies are now indistinguishable from a Funny or Die video mocking a Tim Burton movie. Tim Heidecker joked on twitter that he was cast as Ronald McDonald in Tim Burton’s -- for the time being -- fake McDonald’s movie, but the idea of Burton directing a Ronald McDonald movie is just as likely as him directing a DUMBO movie and maybe a little less ridiculous. Parody is useless in the face of DUMBO because nothing could be said about the film that the film doesn’t say about itself. At least unintentionally. After all, the McDonaldland gang seems a little more conducive to Burton’s ‘pale outsider’ trope and general mall-goth sensibilities than DUMBO does. Grimace even looks like a Burton drawing. Yet, with the possible exception of his unmade SUPERMAN LIVES, I can’t think of a concept more resistant to that Burton touch than DUMBO. But that doesn’t stop Burton from making yet another movie about an outsider who finds an unlikely family in an unexpected place while surrounded by sets that are the Disney Store equivalent to German Expressionism. Burton’s tics loudly clang against the simple, pastel storybook whimsies of the project and the end result is a MR. SHOW sketch that doesn’t realize it’s a MR. SHOW sketch. 

Burton has noted, “[he] wouldn’t know a good script if it bit [him] in the face” which explains a lot, but still, you would think, surely by chance, something would have bit him in the face at some point during the last twenty years. Did SLEEPY HOLLOW give him rabies and all of the good scripts were humanely put down after 1997? But with that said, there’s a big difference between recognizing a bad script and recognizing one that was written by Ehren Kruger. By that I mean there’s a difference between accidentally stepping in dog shit and willfully falling face first into a pile of elephant shit. Kruger was not only the screenwriter behind SCREAM 3, REINDEER GAMES and THE BROTHERS GRIMM, he was also responsible for three TRANSFORMERS sequels. For Burton to attach himself to a Kruger script after a long string of professional and creative disappointments seems to imply he didn’t care or couldn’t read. The script for DUMBO is bad, worse than ARLINGTON ROAD or THE SKELETON KEY or any of the $3 Walmart DVD bin titles Kruger’s name is typically associated with. Basically, it’s the story of a flying elephant told from the perspective of people who take in the majesty of a flying elephant with the tight smiles of actors on their twelfth take who can no longer pretend that a tennis ball on the handle of a Swiffer Wet Jet is a flying elephant. But where the original DUMBO ended at 64 minutes, the live-action DUMBO meanders onward for another 48 minutes with a takedown of Disney’s soulless commercialism that’s about as brave as telling your boss to fuck-off in a whisper while driving home from your job after you were fired. It doesn’t even feel like Kruger wrote a screenplay, it seems like he tried to wrangle an endless series of studio notes into a cohesive narrative. And most of those notes seem to be just the words “woker” written in blood across 120 pages. I understand Disney’s position in trying to distance themselves from all of the problematic parts of the 1941 version of DUMBO, but the updated elements carry the disingenuous and patronizing quality of Bradley Whitford expressing his questionable love for Obama in GET OUT. If Disney wanted to address the animal cruelty found in the animated original they just could have ended the remake with the titular pachyderm and his mother frolicking in the wild. It would be a perfectly fine, fitfully restrained conclusion. But we also get an epilogue in which the owner of Dumbo’s circus (Danny DeVito playing a sort of Disneyfied Frank Reynolds) announces he’s setting all the animals free and apparently replacing them with a zoetrope. If you can overlook the fact that this takes place in 1919 and just a few scenes earlier DeVito was keeping a monkey locked in his desk as a joke, it still feels like empty lip-service. It’s so perfunctory you wonder if the first draft of the scene was just “Note: DeVito died releasing all the circus elephants on the way back to his home planet” and Burton had to flesh that out as much as he possibly could. I appreciate what they’re trying to do but it isn’t subtle and this isn’t BLACKFISH.

Another idea that feels like a studio mandate: none of the animals talk. For me, if you have a flying elephant in your movie, you shouldn’t just have talking animals you should have three mops that sound like Jimmy Cagney and a farting Model-T that communicates through the snippets of Eddie Cantor and Rudy Vallee songs that play on its radio (like a turn-of-the-century BUMBLEBEE). Why are we trying to add realism to a movie where the first shot depicts a smiling, possibly sentient choo-choo train? Case in point, early in the film when Dumbo is revealed to have enormous ears during a circus performance, the audience – bizarrely – is so appalled by this, they start rioting. While this riot is going on, Dumbo’s mother is approached backstage by one of her handlers who starts taunting her! How is the idea of a talking mouse in a ringmaster outfit dumber than a carny berating an elephant by telling her “they’re all laughing at your baby boy” as if he was yelling at Carrie White about her dirty pillows? 

Of course, there’s the ideas that are specifically Kruger’s own. Ideas that reek of his unique dumb guy pretention. Colin Farrell plays a once popular trick horse rider who comes back from WWI as an amputee and is demoted to being Dumbo’s handler. Kruger desperately attempts to draw parallels between Farrell and Dumbo without realizing how insulting it is to compare someone with an actual disability to a fucking cartoon elephant in a clown hat performing loop de loops. At least Kruger’s trying to give Farrell a semblance of a personality. Everyone else is horribly underwritten, particularly Michael Keaton’s vague shrug of a villain and Nico Parker as Farrell’s daughter whose entire personality could be described as “likes saying the word science”. Parker’s character is so boring and underdeveloped her big dramatic moment revolves around her staring blankly at a Marie Curie mannequin. And then there’s the clunky references which are there to ensure that nobody’s ribs in the audience goes unnudged. Timothy the Mouse is given a superfluous cameo, cartoon Dumbo’s drunk visions of pink elephants is recreated with large soap bubbles in a sequence that furthers grinds this overlong movie to a screeching halt, Michael Buffer performs a cleaned-up, spoken word rendition of “When I See an Elephant Fly” before exclaiming, “Let’s get ready to Dumbo!” There’s other stuff, smaller stupider stuff, like the fact that Farrell suddenly has a steampunk robot arm at the end without explanation or the dog dressed up as a werewolf or that Dumbo can only fly when he inhales a feather through his trunk for. If all of this sounds like a so-bad-its-good-you-need-to-see-it-to-believe-it masterpiece, understand that all of this kitschy nonsense is not only couched within the horrible pacing of a late period Burton film it’s also represented by the hideous visuals of a late period Burton film.

How do you describe the production design of DUMBO? The closest I can get is a Thomas Kinkade mural based around the hallucinations of noted serial killer Joe Kallinger but somehow more chilling and mawkish. Instead of the floating, mouthless head of a child named Charlie, we get a CGI elephant that looks like somebody put googly eyes on your grandfather’s withered testicles. And sometimes those elderly, googly-eyed balls are in clown makeup. Dumbo is a concept that can only work in animated form because the sight of a wrinkly, hyper-real elephant with enormous Walter Keane-style baby blue eyes flying around a circus tent with Eva Green on its back is unnerving and unnatural. That scene in THE FLY where a panicked Jeff Goldblum carefully pulls out his fingernails is less intense than any flying scene in Dumbo. And like the Brundle-Fly, vomiting acid on his pint-sized tormentors looks more natural for this Dumbo than a playful squirt of water from his trunk. Of course, the uncanny valley quality of its titular character isn’t helped by the fact the sets in Burton’s DUMBO suggests what HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES would look like filtered through the pages of A Little Golden Book. Burton’s DUMBO either needed to carry the gentle, water-colored hues of a Mary Blair painting or just be a full-on gothic reimagining of the concept; a circus FRANKENWEENIE, if you will. Unfortunately, it’s sort of a half-baked fusion of the two extremes and it never stops being ugly.

I can could go on, but you get the idea. DUMBO is terrible and that’s not surprising. What is surprising is when you consider there was a time when a Tim Burton movie wasn’t an F.W. Murnau film recreated with Precious Moments figurines. Didn’t he make one of Disney’s most iconic animated films of the 90s? Wasn’t he capable of making a quirky family film that wasn’t dull or alienating? No. That was Henry Selick. Burton’s the guy who’d probably make a feature-length version of Kevin Spacey’s Let Me Be Frank video if you sold Spacey to Burton as, “the ultimate outsider” and ensured him that Spacey is in no position to refuse to wear a Bride of Frankenstein wig and whatever hybrid Victorian straitjacket/striped ringmaster’s suit Burton has picked out for him.

Film Review: AQUAMAN by Mike Sullivan

The weekend after AQUAMAN was released I overheard someone note in the magazine section of a Books-A-Million that “AQUAMAN was fun! Like the Brendan Fraser MUMMY movies!” I laughed when I heard this because comparing AQUAMAN to the MUMMY series seems like the faintest praise you could damn a movie with. Those movies aren’t fun as much as they’re ‘something not unpleasant to half-watch on the TV at the Pizza Wheel if you went there too early for your take-out order and your phone just died.’ 

But then I realized that the steadfast, admirable mediocrity of THE MUMMY series seems almost too high of praise for a film concept that for several years existed only as cultural shorthand for the creative bankruptcy of Hollywood and its willingness to adapt any recognizable IP into a multi-million dollar franchise. For decades whenever there was an announcement that some obscure or seemingly lame comic book property was being adapted into a movie, the clicketty-clacketty sound of a million hilarious and very original dudes typing the words, “What’s next? AQUAMAN: THE MOTION PICTURE?” on the AICN comments section immediately followed. The idea of a movie revolving around Aquaman was such a lazy, comic conceit that one of the laziest shows on television -- ENTOURAGE -- took this rejected ROBOT CHICKEN gag and mashed whatever gristle remained on this long-dead, beyond decayed horse into the be-Kangoled foreheads of its undiscerning audience for an entire season. As a film concept, AQUAMAN wasn’t just a joke, it was one of the oldest, unfunniest jokes you could ever tell. And yet, if a concept as unwanted and failure bound as AQUAMAN managed to be as pleasant and watchable as THE MUMMY, wouldn’t that make it kind of successful? If taken within those meager terms, AQUAMAN is kind of successful.

AQUAMAN isn’t a terrible movie, but the filmmakers -- much like the editors at DC -- are clearly overcompensating for what they perceive to be the character’s wimpy past. Aquaman is a badass! A FUCKING BADASS! Do you hear me? And orange chainmail and wavy blonde locks are fine for King Arthur and his knights of the fish fuckers, but not for this ain’t yo daddy’s Aquaman! Aquaman needs to look like a divorced dad’s panicked mid-life crisis fueled makeover if he thought Criss Angel was still relevant. Aquaman needs to be Renegade-era Lorenzo Lamas, a Capri Sun commercial from the mid-90s and the intro to Viva La Bam after it all of it was consumed and pissed into a bottle of Venom Energy Drink. Greasy, grisly guitar riffs need to punctuate his every move when he’s murdering a black guy on a submarine. He needs to be an awesome party dude who speaks frankly about urinating in, on and around ancient cylinders. Yet, even though director James Wan leans into the idea of an Aquaman who looks like he could be that guy in a Denny’s and ragweed scented SONS OF ANARCHY jacket hanging around the parking lot of a Five Fingered Death Punch concert hassling people for tickets, the film clearly seems more at ease with the idea of a perma-grinned Aryan Aquaman; the kind that never stops waving at an unseen audience as he rides around on a giant seahorse. Seemingly inspired by THOR: RAGNAROK, AQUAMAN doesn’t take itself too seriously. But whereas the third Thor movie was helmed by a comparatively more artful director with a strong grasp of what does and doesn’t work in a comedic sense, AQUAMAN seems to be helmed by the same 35 writers behind THE FLINTSTONES movie. At one point an octopus is seen playing the drums, at another Amber Heard is seen wearing a prom dress made out of a squid and several jellyfish, a character calls another character a, “slack-bellied slug.” Hell, there’s even a bit involving the reverse scuba suits worn by Atlantean soldiers (why some Atlanteans can breathe on land unassisted while others can’t isn’t explained) and the desperate lengths these soldiers will go if their suits are compromised on land -- they’ll stick their head in a toilet. If RAGNAROK was a live action Jack Kirby comic, AQUAMAN is a nearly three hour episode of JABBERJAW. This is a cartoon. A dumb cartoon that’s dumb cartooniness is reflected in Heard’s cheap-looking, four-color getup as Mera. Heard doesn’t look like she’s playing a character as much as she looks like she’s cosplaying as a character from the AQUAMAN movie.

Yet as dumb and as cartoony as AQUAMAN is, the film is needlessly convoluted and bloated. A superhero movie with a message about the importance of believing in yourself shouldn’t be the exposition equivalent to THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT. Characters explain things within explanations within exposition-laden flashbacks of a Poseidon hologram made of water reciting exposition. Like too many superhero movies, AQUAMAN is mostly a bunch of actors in front of a green screen taking turns reading a Wikipedia entry about the property the movie is based on. But apart from the exposition, AQUAMAN is way too long. Roll your eyes as much as you want when discussing Tim Burton’s BATMAN, but it’s a leaner and a far better paced film. BATMAN didn’t need a twenty minute prologue revolving around the courtship of Batman’s dad and a freegan with white girl Trustafarian dreadlocks that lives in the ocean (Nicole Kidman). BATMAN didn’t take a break from its storyline so that its titular character could go on a treasure hunt in a sequence that plays like an unwanted mash-up of SAHARA, SPLASH and UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN. BATMAN didn’t need to nudge its audience in the ribs about past events while simultaneously setting up future events as if it was the fifth episode of an AMC series in its third season because it was a movie with a beginning, a middle and an end. Not a cog in the wheel of a bigger franchise that’s cycling through an endless second act.

But, again, like the Brendan Fraser MUMMY movies, AQUAMAN isn’t terrible. In fact, there’s quite a few things I liked. To start with, everyone is floating in this. Dolph Lundgren, Willem Dafoe, Graham McTavish and the rest are all bobbing unnaturally along in the ocean while standing bolt upright, arms crossed, their hair flailing wildly. Untold millions spent on CGI and everybody is stuck in an eerie tableau as if they were discarded JC Penney mannequins that were chucked into the river. And speaking of off-putting CGI, I loved the goofy touch of having Oceanmaster’s metallic helmet mirror the facial expressions of its wearer: the deeply unappealing Patrick Wilson. Watching a helmet cry out in anguish was nearly as sweet as seeing Wilson -- an actor who in a just world would play nothing but a string of pissy, insecure high school math teachers in either Alexander Payne or Todd Solondz movies -- accept the role he should have played far sooner: an unctuous racist with gills. On a less backhanded note, I genuinely liked Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Black Manta and the relationship he shares with his Somali pirate father (Michael Beach) and wished the movie could have instead been about these two robbing atomic submarines or stealing inexplicably advanced Atlantean technology. Unfortunately, we didn’t get that film. What we got was Brendan Fraser’s THE MUMMY: a movie you watched over a holiday weekend and instantly forgot about. But unlike THE MUMMY, memories of this movie will only come to mind when you stumble upon a Jesus Pez dispenser at a flea market a decade from now and realize that’s supposed to be that Khal Drago guy as Aquaman.