This Week's Movies - The Mummy

Roguish US army scout Nick Morton (Tom Cruise) stumbles upon an Egyptian tomb in – strangely enough – Iraq. After trying to loot as much gold ‘n’ jewels as he can, Morton accidentally releases… THE MUMMY (Sofia Boutella), who promptly crashes a plane, sucks out the souls of passers-by and generally causes a right ol’ ruckus. Think mind control, zombies and about six MASSIVE what-on-earth-was-he-thinking blockblustery stunts that you’ve come to expect from a Tom Cruise movie. Elsewhere, there’s Dr Jekyll (Russell Crowe) and a ghostly tagger-along (Jake Johnson) but let’s not get into that right now.

Pros:

1. Essentially a Mission Impossible wrapped in 4000-year-old loo roll, The Mummy delivers colossal action set-pieces the way only Tom Cruise can. There’s a zero-g plane crash, an ambulance chase for the ages and Tombo himself jumping into an on-its-side crashing London bus. If you want IMAX-worthy stunts, this is the slick, polished, the-money’s-there-on-the-screen big studio film for you.
2. As the opening salvo for Universal Studio’s ‘Dark Universe’ – a Marvel-like connected film universe, only with horror icons like Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and The Invisible Man – The Mummy lives up to the ‘dark’ in a way that few big summer tentpoles would dare. There’s a decent amount of properly grim stuff here, and a general tone that things won’t necessarily all be okay in the end.
3. At no point does The Rock turn up, turn into a terrible CGI scorpion man and start snipping things with his claws. Anyone who remembers the Brendan Fraser ‘n’ Rachel Weisz ‘n’ John Hannah-starring The Mummy Returns (2001) knows what I’m talking about (and probably still has the same nightmares I do).

Cons:

1. At times it feels more like a Tom Cruise movie than it does a traditional ‘Mummy’ movie. That’s obviously a conscious decision from the producers, setting it in the 21st century and amping up the action in the process. Rejigging it for 2017 does allow for planes, cars, buses and modern cities to face the wrath of her Mummyness, but if you’re hankering for a lumbering, creepy, creaky, ‘spooky’ horror film, this isn’t it.
2. Some of the dialogue is apologetically shonky, with the action set-pieces glued together with cobwebby lines that just do the job and not much else. At one notable moment, Cruise’s serial tomb raider Morton somehow doesn’t know that a sarcophagus is a type of stone coffin that ancient Egyptians were buried in. Hmm. Bits of the back-and-forth with comedy compadre Jake Johnson (New Girl, Jurassic World) also don’t quite work, but something else invariably springs onto the screen – such as Tom Cruise being eaten alive by rats, say – that you don’t *always* notice.
3. There is some a-grade ‘Bad British Geography’ here. Like when Thor teleports onto a tube train in Thor: The Dark World and is given nonsensical directions to get to Greenwich Naval College, there’s a near-total lack of respect for where things actually are in Britain. A plane crashes in Surrey and Tom Cruise wakes up in Oxford, while in London, it seems as if there are magical portals at the end of every road that allow you to jump across the capital, from Soho to The City, as if the public transport system was a total waste of time.

Three word review: Efficient mega-budget blockbustering.