Still watching reputedly bad films sourced in a manner which does not result in corporate enrichment while I wait for depression to stop kicking my ass. I am picking these things pretty much at random, and tonight: Tom Cruise vehicle and Universal's abortive attempt at a "No, I'm Spartacus!" Cinematic Universe, The Mummy.
What I find amazing about so many bad films that everyone knows are bad is that everyone knows that they're bad but I only find out by watching them that in addition to having, y'know, bad scripts, they're also ridiculously racist.
I mean, The Mummy, conceptually loaded, lotta Victorian colonial bullshit packaged in there. And, okay, this film wants to (and was a conscious attempt at a Cinematic Universe consisting of films which were intended to) rip off classic horror. And the Brendan Frasier Mummy gets away with a bunch of the same general kind of stuff by being period pulp — but this starts out going: England. Present Day.
You cannot uncomfortably wave off stinking Victorian racist bullshit as "well, you know, period piece" if you set it present-day. If you're going to do present day, you, uh, you really ought to reckon with the fact that pulp is a genre sodden with racism? Not just slap some modern tacitcool on it and call yourself done. Which is to say, all the art-thieving Middle-Eastern-adventuring derring-do in the first act is. Uh. Yeah. And then there's the obligatory Hollywood US military reputation-laundering. And then there's the orientalist Ancient Egypt Totes Believed In Some Stuff (Which Modern White Guys Made Up, but just don't worry about it and vibe, man, it's pulp). Identifying Set as the god of death is...really reductive? afaik? and identifying death with evil with the Christian devil is real shitshow hours, I tell you what.
Expositing heavily that sometimes!..what you need!..to fight a monster!..is another monster! is just. You poor bastard, I hope mouthing this heavy-handed tin-eared crap paid well. Victorian authors could get away with characters standing around declaiming this kind of overt, portentious sledgehammering on the point; modern film scriptwriters, shall we say...rarely.
And then, having been permanently possessed by what we were assured — like, ten minutes ago — was The Ultimate Evil, Tom Cruise's cardboard cutout of a character goes right back to...fucking about desecrating Middle Eastern archaeological sites for funsies? Or something?