THE MUMMY

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND THINGS

So suddenly universe-building is the new thing. Given what Marvel has achieved by throwing together a raft of established characters into each other's films and what DC is trying to due with their own superhero roster, maybe it's not that surprising that other studios are rummaging through their own back catalogue to see who they can bolt together. This is the first project in Universal's so-called Dark Universe (the logo dissolves straight out of Universal's own right at the start), which is supposedly going to lump Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Creature From The Black Lagoon and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde together in an ongoing series. To an extent they used to: Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster and The Wolf Man were always turning up in each other's films in the 1940s, though they never expanded it to incorporate any of their other stock.

Tom Cruise is at his least likeable for some time as the uninterestingly named Nick Morton, a US soldier and treasure hunter who deserts his military assignment in Iraq to follow a map he's stolen from archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), who's tracking it down for Dr Jekyll (Russell Crowe). Turns out that the map is not for a trove of shiny knick-knacks he can shift on the black market for a few dollars, but the lost Egyptian pyramid of evil princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) who was mummified and buried alive for her treachery. Of course she comes back to life and seeks to turn our hero into the vessel for her lost love and then the two immortals will rule the world...

The Mummy is absolute nonsense, obviously, with too many things happening through writer's contrivance: the logic of the piece holds that this all takes place just as the missing jewel from a sacred dagger turns up in London when works on Crossrail (!) suddenly chance upon a Crusader burial chamber. If that hadn't happened, or the charmless Nick hadn't just happened to steal the map (or then hadn't been placed under military arrest for dereliction of duty), or the sarcophagus had been flown anywhere else in the world except directly over the church where the aforementioned dagger had been hidden hundreds of years previously.... Too much happenstance that's beyond the control of even the worst undead deities but crucially not beyond six credited screenwriters. It's also saddled with an unattractive star turn, an unmemorable score and a blatant riff on An American Werewolf In London as Nick's ill-fated sidekick keeps haunting him for presumably comedic relief.

Still, it's kind of enjoyable in a brain-off kind of a way: it's got huge production values and gosh-wow spectacle, and mercifully Universal haven't wimped out and trimmed the sometimes grisly imagery down to get a wimpy 12A (it was PG13 in the States). There are zombies, creepy bugs and spiders, apocalyptic sandstorms in London: you're not shortchanged for incident and stuff happening. As to where it's supposed to fit into this Dark Universe? It's scarcely a spoiler to state that a redeemed Nick rides off into the desert while Ahmanet is vanquished in the last reel, so any further Mummies are presumably going to be different ones that Nick (or someone else) has to take on, meaning that the only likely connection to an ongoing decades-long franchise would be Russell Crowe's Jekyll and Hyde characters, presumably the UDU equivalent of MCU's Nick Fury. He's actually quite fun, though no explanation is given as to what he's doing in the present day. But as a film it's a lot less entertaining than the Indiana Jones-flavoured romps of the last reboot (at least the first two, anyway), and it has absolutely no atmosphere of horror or proper scares. Agreeable, and occasionally pleasantly nasty, no-think fodder while it's on, but there's nothing much under the spectacle.

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