Film review: Messy and muddled Mummy fails to cast the spell

For now we’re cursed with The Mummy, a product lacking even the carefree spirit of the Brendan Fraser Mummy trilogy.

From left, Jake Johnson as Chris Vail, Annabelle Wallis as Jenny Halsey and Tom Cruise as Nick Morton in The Mummy. Chiabella James / Universal Pictures

The Mummy

Director: Alex Kurtzman

Starring: Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Russell Crowe

Two stars

Of all the CGI-ed supernatural forces slung in Alex Kurtzman's The Mummy (and, believe me, there are a lot), none can compete with the spectral spectacle of Tom Cruise, at the age of 54.

He and his abs are almost creepily ageless. So it's almost fitting that in one of the typically bonkers scenes in The Mummy, Cruise wakes up without any clothes on and unscathed alongside cadavers in a morgue, where he bewilderedly removes the tag attached to his toe. Indefatigable and unkillable, Cruise really is the undead. He's like the anti-Steve Buscemi.

Yet Cruise and The Mummy – the opening salvo in Universal's bid to birth its Dark Universe monster movie franchise – are a poor fit, and not the good kind, such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

There's plenty of standard, cocky Cruise leading man stuff here – running, swimming, daredevil airplane acrobatics, more running. But his relentless forward momentum is sapped by the convoluted monster mishmash that engulfs The Mummy, a movie conceived and plotted like the monster version of Marvel. Increasingly, Cruise – like big-budget movies, themselves – is running in circles.

He plays Nick Morton, a roguish Army sergeant who plunders antiquities from Iraq with his partner Chris Vail (Jake Johnson). In a remote village, they unearth a giant Egyptian tomb bathed in mercury along with archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis). In it lies the Egyptian princess Ahmanet (Algerian-French actress Sofia Boutella) who was mummified alive (imagine that wrapping job) after trying to unleash the evil Egyptian god of Set while killing her Pharaoh father, his second wife and the newborn baby that would deny her the throne. Naturally, she's going to get loose. The backstories are shown as The Mummy stumbles out of its grave, vainly trying to organise the story around two burial sites (the other is in London), the strange visions that begin plaguing Morton, and a quixotic (or merely capitalistic) gambit to stitch together a unifying principle for the Dark Universe. Mysterious apocalyptic happenings (a swarm of crows, a horde of rats, occasional ghouls) prompt a series of helter-skelter chase scenes that eventually lead Morton and Halsey to Prodigium, a stealth organisation led by the dapper Dr Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe) that controls monstrous outbreaks, including those of its Schizophrenic leader.

Prodigium would seem to be the connecting tissue for Universal's shared universe, with plans for Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Creature from the Black Lagoon and more in the works. Much of The Mummy hinges on Boutella's vengeful and vaguely misogynistic monster (she for some reason needs a man – Morton, it turns out – to really do damage). But much of the film endeavours to set up the characters – maybe even famous phantoms – to come.

What the supposed value of having these movies "share" a universe is, I'm not sure. Movies aren't sandboxes and the only time I remember enjoying a character connect films was Michael Keaton's Ray Nicolette popping up in the Elmore Leonard adaptations Out of Sight and Jackie Brown. Where these films could be fun, though, is seeing a talented star play a big, theatrical character that would honour the ghosts of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Javier Bardem and Johnny Depp are already lined up, so who knows? But the desperate need to graft them into a larger comic-book-like "world" – and a thinly conceived one, at that – suggests there won't be much room for any actor to breathe.

For now we're cursed with The Mummy, a messy and muddled product lacking even the carefree spirit of the Brendan Fraser Mummy trilogy. There are moments of humour in the script by David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie and Dylan Kussman, but Cruise isn't the one (maybe Chris Pratt?) to pull off aloofly, referring to the mummy as "the chick in the box".

Almost to the degree that he was in The Edge of Tomorrow, Cruise is put through the ringer. A spiralling cargo plane spins him like laundry. He careens through a double-decker bus. His rib cage is yanked. Cruise remains, as ever, eminently game. But he, like us moviegoers, might have to starting wondering: What supernatural being have we angered?

* Associated Press