Grave mistake
Tom Cruise’s tombraiding remake can’t exhume the fun of old.
Mummy movies first lurched onto the screen in 1932, when a bandaged Boris Karloff was asked to moan softly while lumbering with arms outstretched.
The pattern hasn’t changed much since: unlikely heroes disturb a tomb, unleashing something ancient and evil, and the climax inevitably involves the spectre’s being repackaged and reinterred for another instalment.
Tom Cruise is the hero in this second official remake of the 1932 film. Having already scaled the tallest building in the world, flipped birds from fighter planes, jumped on Oprah’s couch and defeated entire alien races, he may have nothing left to do but duke it out with a 5000-yearold zombified Egyptian royal. That would be Princess Ahmanet, played by Sofia Boutella, who, appropriately, has the charisma of a corpse.
Cruise, mercifully, plays against type as Nick Morton, an opportunistic archaeological thief, described at one point as “compulsively devious and utterly devoid of soul”, which is also a nice way to describe The Mummy, a film that rigorously follows the model of the modern action blockbuster from tomb to teary ending.
The picture has none of the silly sense of adventure found in the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies from 1999 on. And after the past few months, there’s something distinctly disquieting about watching Londoners flee an apocalyptic manifestation of radical evil – complete with a shot of a swarmed Westminster Bridge.
The film, a launch of Universal Studios’ new “Dark Universe” franchise based on its classic monsters, tips a hat to Frankenstein pioneer James Whale when Russell Crowe’s tweedy Dr Jekyll says, “Welcome to a new world of gods and monsters.” But I was already looking for this tomb’s exit.
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