Curse of the Crummy MUMMY!
Buried in cliches as old as the pyramids, Tom Cruise's monstrous remake is beyond redemption
HARD on the heels of Wonder Woman comes The Mummy, about a vengeful ancient Egyptian princess who is woken from the dead 5,000 years after being mummified alive.
That makes it an all-female battle for supremacy at the boxoffice, which The Mummy deserves to lose, bandaged hands down.
We all like a few hieroglyphics with our hokum, but this is too much, an absolute barrage of digitally enhanced silliness that not even Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe can save.
However, there are some undeniably slick action scenes, some great stunts and, for amateur Egyptologists, all the cliches you hold most dear: sarcophagi, scarab rings, sphinxes, amulets, pyramids, the lot. I really can’t say pharaoh than that. Cruise plays Nick Morton, a soldier with a U.S. reconnaissance unit in modern-day Iraq, who exploits his position to steal ancient artefacts and sell them on the black market.
Following a bombing mission against insurgents, the desert dust gives way to reveal the burial chamber of Princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), which, in one of several nods to the Indiana Jones movies, is guarded by thousands of scuttling spiders.
It is also of great interest to a sexy archaeologist (in the movies there are rarely any other kind) called Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis). She is wise to Nick’s shady activities because they have recently had a one-night-stand in Baghdad, during which he sneakily raided her belongings.
But she is soon in his debt. Shortly before their transporter plane crashes — over England of all places, and with Ahmanet’s sarcophagus on board — Nick saves her life by hooking her up to the aircraft’s only parachute and pushing her out.
That he miraculously survives the crash himself turns out to be the work of the resurrected Ahmanet, with whom he has a mysterious ancient connection conveyed in lots of meaningful flashbacks.
Yet there is no mystery in this film greater than that of Jenny’s pink lip gloss, which through the hairiest tribulations imaginable, including the plane incident, a high-speed ambulance crash, and near-fatal immersion in a flooded London Underground tunnel, remains utterly immaculate.
ATWO-HOUR Revlon commercial could not champion the wonders of lip gloss any more spiritedly than The Mummy.
The action moves to London, in case you were wondering, because in 1127 AD, a knight crusader was buried with the ruby stolen from the handle of the iconic Dagger of Set, the Egyptian God of Death.
Ahmanet wants it back, and to that end she has enlisted a small army of the living dead, including Nick’s old army accomplice, Vail (Jake Johnson).
By now, everything is getting terribly overwrought, and I can’t have been the only one in the cinema to have shifted uncomfortably in my seat during a scene in which terror is visited upon the streets of our capital, with thousands fleeing for their lives. Could, should, the release of The Mummy not have been postponed in the wake of the London Bridge attack?
Still, it’s not as though any of this seems remotely real. And new levels of preposterousness are reached with the help of Dr Henry Jekyll (Crowe), who leads a shadowy organisation devoted to finding and exterminating monsters. The irony is that Dr Jekyll himself has a monstrous alter ego, by the name of . . . Mr Hyde.
I have no idea why Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic story of split personality should be absorbed into The Mummy. Perhaps director Alex Kurtzman and his writers wanted to anchor the film’s soaring daftness with something vaguely familiar. If so, it doesn’t work. It just makes it dafter still.
All that said, there is an energy to The Mummy that might appeal to some cinema-goers. There are also a few modest frights and Cruise fans can look forward to heaps of derring-do, not to mention a fleeting glimpse of him in the buff.
Mind you, I watched the film in full IMAX 3D, which frankly is no way to see anyone unclothed, and also makes you want to shield your eyes from the megawatt Cruise smile.
As in 2014’s superior Edge Of Tomorrow, incidentally, Cruise’s character is meant to be innately malignant in this film, but you can almost hear him and the producers agreeing that he must have a whole sarcophagus-full of redeeming qualities, for the simple reason that he’s Tom Cruise It’s not one of his better endeavours, frankly. Towards the end, as Nick tries to make things right between him and the lovely Jenn he says: ‘I have made so many mistakes, but not this time.’ I’m not at all sure about that.
IF THE Mummy has several cinematic antecedents, going right back to the 1932 Boris Karloff version of which it is very notionally remake, My Cousin Rachel has just one. There was a 1952 version Daphne du Maurier’s novel about