STALK LIKE AN EGYPTIAN
Tom Cruise tries to avoid the attentions of an overbearing Mummy in slick action adventure
THE MUMMY
WE are living in a battle-scarred world of gods and monsters, and Tom Cruise plays both in director Alex Kurtzman’s action-packed reboot of the classic horror.
This modern day take on The Mummy kicks sand in the face of the tongue-in-cheek trilogy headlined by Brendan Fraser and nods affectionately to the seminal 1932 picture starring Boris Karloff.
Special effects-laden destruction, including eerie scenes of crowds running for their lives through the streets of London, is peppered with intense combat sequences involving the villain’s zombified underlings.
One bout of fisticuffs in a church descends into blackly humorous delirium as Cruise’s fists and feet become lodged in the decomposing skulls and chests of the reanimated dead.
As usual, the leading man performs his own stunts including a jaw-dropping aerial sequence shot in zero gravity.
The film occasionally goes into freefall too: character development is undernourished, Cruise’s on-screen romance with co-star Annabelle Wallis barely simmers and the three scriptwriters pose an intriguing moral conundrum about self-sacrifice but have no intention of wrestling with the consequences.
The flawed hero is Nick Morton (Cruise), who undertakes long range reconnaissance for the US military alongside Sergeant Chris Vail (Jake Johnson). The two men abuse their position to steal artefacts for collectors.
A daring treasure hunt in Iraq – formerly Mesopotamia – unearths the tomb of long forgotten Egyptian princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), who was buried alive 5000 years ago after she forged a blood pact with Set, the god of war, to murder her father (Selva Rasalingam) and seize the throne.
Plucky archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Wallis) and a crack military squad led by Colonel Greenaway (Courtney B Vance) fly Ahmanet’s sarcophagus back to the UK.
En route, a murder of crows brings down the flight.
Jenny escapes by parachute but Nick perishes… only to be reanimated without a scratch by a newly resurrected Ahmanet, who has chosen him as the human vessel for Set.
A haphazard quest for salvation leads to a shadowy organisation called Prodigium fronted by chemical pathologist Dr Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe).
The Mummy is the opening salvo in a universe of movie monstrosities that will include Javier Bardem as Frankenstein’s monster and Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man.
Kurtzman’s picture is suitably dark to warrant a 15 certificate – spiders and rats abound – and polished action trumps gutwrenching emotion throughout.
As Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 2 proved, it is possible to have both.
Even with Cruise’s bruising zero gravity acrobatics, The Mummy is not the daddy of this year’s summer blockbusters.