Who's The Mummy? Sofia Boutella as Ahmanet
Mummy's Love? Tom Cruise as Nick Morton
Where? Iraq, England, Egypt (in flashbacks)
How Long? 110 minutes
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I can't tell you how much I wanted to like this, to stand resolute in the face of the complete critical condemnation the latest iteration of The Mummy disappeared under upon its cinematic release.
But it really is that bad. It's a mess of unnecessarily repetitive exposition; over-the-top special effects sequences that are there only for inclusion in the trailers, serving no plot purpose whatsoever; a surfeit of bland characters; and a story of jumbled random encounters that made me think the writing team had simply transcribed a 13-year-old's Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
Tom Cruise is the nominal protagonist, Nick Morton, an amoral and opportunistic treasure hunter who uses his military career as a smoke-screen to loot valuable artefacts from war zones. Yeah, a real stand-up guy we can all instantly emphasise with!
I think we're supposed to like him purely based on the fact he's played by Tom Cruise. Sadly, that isn't enough.
Using a map stolen from British archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), a character so one-dimensional she almost doesn't exist, Nick and his buddy Sergeant Chris Vail (Jake Johnson) stumble upon an unusual ancient Egyptian burial site in Iraq.
The sarcophagus of Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) is retrieved and loaded onto a cargo plane. En route to London, Chris is possessed by evil spirits and killed, returning as a ghost that only Nick can see in a Griffin Dunne in American Werewolf In London sort of deal.
The plane suffers the mother of all bird strikes and crashes in the English countryside.
Nick miraculously survives the experience without a scratch. It seems he has been "cursed" by Ahmanet to be her "Chosen One".
There's a chase sequence involving Nick and Jenny in an ambulance, escaping Ahmanet and her newly-raised zombie followers.
This ends with Ahmanet being captured and our "heroes" being whisked off to London to meet Jenny's boss, Dr Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe) of the Prodigium, a super-secret monster-hunting organisation located under the Natural History Museum.
The Prodigium want to dissect and study Ahmanet, but before they can she escapes and wreaks havoc on London, trying to recover a crucial gem hidden in a knight's tomb, recently unearthed by the Crossrail excavations.
Ahmanet needs the gem to complete a ritual that involves sacrificing her Chosen One (ie Nick) with a magical dagger that will then summon the Ancient Egyptian god Set.
Nick, however, comes up with a cunning plan to thwart Ahmanet's schemes... by doing exactly what she wants!
The Mummy is all over the place. There are traces of a good idea in there, but somewhere along the development process it clearly got away from the film-makers and took on a monstrous life of its own.
There's a definite whiff of the pulp genre's freewheeling disregard for logic in service of a rollickin' story here, but that style's bravura exuberance is replaced with generic corporate clichés.
A sterling example of film-making by committee, the fingerprints of the suits and money-men are all over The Mummy, leaving the unavoidable sensation that an eye-catching trailer was made first - to sell the concept to the general public - and then a film was assembled around that.
Outside of the unengaging leads, you have an antagonist with seemingly god-like powers, able to do pretty much whatever she wants - when it suits the plot - while conversely seeming impotent when it serves the plot.
For instance, one minute she's having to create zombie followers one at a time, by killing people and giving them a "kiss of life", and the next she can raise a horde out of thin air with just a wave of her hand.
There's so much material crammed in this 110 minute movie, clearly with the aim of laying the groundwork for Universal's proposed Dark Universe 'shared world' of monster movies, that even though the time flys by surprisingly quickly you can't help seeing large chunks that could easily have been left on the cutting room floor.
Russell Crowe is wasted as Dr Jekyll, whose outburst as Mr Hyde is - like so much here - pointless and Tom Cruise just phones it in, playing Tom Cruise at his least engaging. His performance is about as far away from his charming best as imaginable.
More an action-adventure funfair ride than a horror movie, the true horror of The Mummy is that anyone involved in releasing this into the wild ever thought it was a competent, coherent, movie in the first place.
