The Mummy (2017)

The Mummy (2017)

 IMDB rating 6.3/10 (as on 09.06.2017)

PG-13 | 1h 50min | Action, Adventure, Fantasy

An ancient princess is awakened from her crypt beneath the desert, bringing with her malevolence grown over millennia, and terrors that defy human comprehension.

Director: Alex Kurtzman

Writers: David Koepp (screenplay), Christopher McQuarrie (screenplay)

Stars: Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Annabelle Wallis 

IMDB link Here

Movie Rating ★★✬☆☆  

 This Tom Cruise film takes a lesson from Bollywood

Shubhra Gupta

These are my top five takeaways from The Mummy reboot, fronted by the Cruise man, and a golden-eyed wraith who rises from the earth.

If you are a beautiful Egyptian princess buried alive, you are going to wake up scores of years later. Take it from us. And the first thing you will do is to look upon the face of a handsome stranger, and your hardened heart will melt. Sofia Boutella (not as striking as she was in her ‘Star Trek’ turn, but eye-catching still) plays the part of the New Mummy Rising with a permanent snarl-cum-wistfulness, tattoos running down her face. Because she is female, she has to be jealous of another woman who is vying for the attention of her man. Lesson: hell hath no fury like a mummy scorned.

Said handsome stranger played by Tom Cruise, a top gun in his mid-50s is the portrait of a star in search of a persona. What do you do, once you’ve done and dusted several mission impossible-s? Why, become a looking-for-a-main-chance-adventurer making eyes at a modern day archeologist, and a mummy with a sexy bod whom he calls a ‘chick’. Did we say this was a sexist flick?

The impact of Bollywood is getting stronger, even if it shows up for a flash: the Egyptian princess walks on ancient sandy dunes just the way a series of Bolly beauties have whenever they are transported to a desert for a song-and-dance— acres of flowing robes streaming behind, metal bustiers to the fore, background music swelling. Who says schmaltzy Bollywood has no legs?

Taking that point further, who says you need a plot when you have such a svelte-looking mummy (once she cracks open her tomb), a blonde scientist, and a good-looking if weathered rogue larking about in Iraq and London, falling out of planes, and shooting people underground in London? Only problem, though, is that the moment all the frantic action stops, the film grinds to a halt.

You don’t even need a Russell Crowe to do his thing — swallow the screen — when you are a kick-starting a monster franchise (oh yeah, just wait for it). This must be the only film in which Crowe, after spouting some high-falutin’ rubbish about good and evil, just disappears into the scenery. What we are left with is our hero kicking up a lot of sound and fury, and sand, of course, with the promise of much more of the same to come. Not actively awful, but not a barrel of silly fun either.

By the pricking of my thumb, something evil this way comes. And goes, after a few thrills and spills, which includes, psst, a Cruise in the buff. Like, in the altogether. Fully.

Read full review at Indian express

‘The Mummy,’ With Tom Cruise, Deserves a Quick Burial  

A. O. SCOTT  

You’ve no doubt been told that if you can’t say something nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all. If I followed that rule, I’d be unemployed. But still. There’s no great joy in accentuating the negative. So I will say this in favor of “The Mummy”: It is 110 minutes long. That is about 20 minutes shorter than “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales,” about which I had some unkind things to say a couple of weeks ago. Simple math will tell you how much better this movie is than that one. If you have no choice but to see it — a circumstance I have trouble imagining — you can start in on your drinking that much sooner.

“The Mummy” begins with a supposed Egyptian proverb to the effect that “we” never really die; “we” assume new forms and keep right on living. I’m not an Egyptologist, but it seems just as likely that those words were lifted from a movie-studio strategy memo. Universal, lacking a mighty superhero franchise, has gone into its intellectual-property files, which are full of venerable monsters, and created a commercial agglomeration it calls the Dark Universe. “The Mummy” is the first of a slew — a swarm? a pestilence? — of features reviving those old creatures, including the one from the Black Lagoon. We can also look forward to new visits from Frankenstein’s monster and his bride, the Wolf Man and the Invisible Man, among others.

It sounds like fun. The “Mummy” reboot from 1999, directed by Stephen Sommers and starring Brendan Fraser, was kind of fun. Monster movies frequently are. This one, directed by Alex Kurtzman and starring Tom Cruise, is an unholy mess. Mr. Cruise plays Nick Morton, a jaunty military daredevil with a sideline in antiquities theft and a nutty sidekick (Jake Johnson). When a caper goes wrong, the two call in an airstrike on an Iraqi village — I guess that’s something people are doing for kicks nowadays — and a mysterious tomb is unearthed. Luckily, an archaeologist, Dr. Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), is on hand to explain what it’s all about and also to affirm Nick’s heterosexuality.

Mr. Crowe plays another fixture in the Dark Universe, a label that strikes me as a bit of an exaggeration. Dim Universe would be more accurate, with respect both to the murky, ugly images and to the intellectual capacities of the script, written and conceived by a bunch of people who are capable of better. The old black-and-white Universal horror movies were a mixed bag, but they had some imagination. They could be creepy or campy, weird or lyrical. “The Mummy” gestures — or flails — in a number of directions but settles into the dreary 21st-century action-blockbuster template. There’s chasing and fighting, punctuated by bouts of breathless explaining and a few one-liners that an archaeologist of the future might tentatively decode as jokes.

There is a vague notion that Nick is struggling with dueling impulses toward good and evil, acting out his version of the Jekyll-Hyde predicament. A more interesting movie might have involved a similar struggle within Ahmanet, but a more interesting movie was not on anybody’s mind.

It will be argued that this one was made not for the critics but for the fans. Which is no doubt true. Every con game is played with suckers in mind.

Read full review at New york times

Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆ 

 Tom Cruise returns in poorly bandaged corpse reviver

Peter Bradshaw

Be afraid, for here it is … again … emerging waxily from the darkness. This disturbing figure must surely be thousands of years old by now, a princeling worshipped as a god but entombed in his own riches and status; remarkably well preserved. It is Tom Cruise, who is back to launch a big summer reboot of The Mummy, that classic chiller about the revived corpse from ancient Egypt, from which the tomb door was last prised off in a trilogy of films between 1999 and 2008 with the lantern-jawed and rather forgotten Brendan Fraser in the lead. And before that, of course, there were classic versions with Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee both variously getting the all-over St John Ambulance treatment.

Traditionally, The Mummy is a scary movie (though unserious) about taboo and transgression, based on the made-up pop myth about the mummy’s “curse” – which has no basis in the history of ancient Egypt, but is a cheeky colonialist invention, which recasts local objection to our tomb-looting as something supernatural, malign and irrational.

Yet that is not what this Mummy is about. It brings in the usual element of sub-Spielberg gung-ho capers, but essentially sees The Mummy as a superhero origin movie; or possibly supervillain; or Batmanishly both. The supporting characters are clearly there to be brought back as superhero-repertory characters for any putative Mummy franchise, including one who may well be inspired by Two-Face from The Dark Knight.

This has some nice moments but is basically a mess, with various borrowings, including some mummified bits from An American Werewolf in London. The plot sags like an aeon-old decaying limb: a jumble of ideas and scenes from what look like different screenplay drafts. There are two separate ancient “tomb-sites” which have to be busted open: one in London and one in Iraq. (The London one, on the site of the Crossrail excavation, contains the remains of medieval knights identified as “crusaders” who have in their dead Brit mitts various strategically important jewels they have taken from Egyptians: who were subsequently buried in what is now Iraq. Erm, Egyptians in Iraq? Go figure. Perhaps it’s because they are evil and had to be taken out of the country, like CIA rendition of terror suspects.)

The Cruisemeister himself is left high and dry by plot lurches that trigger his boggle-eyed, WTF expression. In one scene, he is nude so we can see what undeniably great shape he’s in. The flabby, shapeless film itself doesn’t have his muscle-tone.

Russell Crowe lumbers on at one stage, amply filling a three-piece suit, playing an archaeological expert and connoisseur of secret burial sites, who has some sinister connection with government agencies. Unlike Nick, he has no Indiana Jones-type heroism, and that formal attire of his signals that he does not have Nick’s kind of heroic looseness. He is a figure to be mistrusted, although when he reveals his name and his destiny, he is just a distraction – and silly.

In the end, having encouraged us to cheer for Tom Cruise as an all-around hero, the film tries to have it both ways and confer upon him some of the sepulchral glamour of evil, and he almost has something Lestat-ish or vampiric about him. Yet the film really won’t make up its mind. It’s a ragbag of action scenes which needed to be bandaged more tightly.

Read full review at The guardian

Movie Rating ★★★☆☆    

 Buried in cliches as old as the pyramids, Tom Cruise's monstrous remake is beyond redemption  

BRIAN VINER  

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 box office, 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 pharoah than that.

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.

A two-hour Revlon commercial could not champion the wonders of lip gloss any more spiritedly than The Mummy.

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.

In this film, as in 2014’s superior Edge Of Tomorrow, Cruise’s character is meant to be innately malignant, 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 Jenny, he says: ‘I have made so many mistakes, but not this time.’ I’m not at all sure about that.

  

  Read full review at Daily mail

Movie Rating ★★★☆☆    

Tom Cruise's fun CGI horror show needs more meat on its bones

Rebecca Hawkes   

Cursed tombs, mummified monarchs and horror cinema have long gone hand in bandaged hand - and for good reason. The genre plays into our fascination with long-lost civilizations, but also offers all the gory nitty-gritty of imperfect resurrected corpses. While the concept might seem dated, postcolonial anxieties and ongoing debates about the rightful home of the world’s treasures could arguably provide rich grounds for an inventive, gloriously tongue-in-cheek modern Mummy movie.

Naturally enough, Alex Kurtzman’s new film The Mummy, an attempt to kick off a rebooted “Dark Universe” franchise starring the classic Universal monsters, from the Bride of Frankenstein to The Invisible Man (who will be played by Johnny Depp, an actor quite a lot of film fans would probably like to see disappear from cinemas for good), is nothing of the sort.

In fact, it’s not really a horror film at all, but a supernatural action blockbuster. Spine-tingling chills are in short supply, but there are plenty of crashes, explosions and CGI spiders.

Followng some run-ins with insurgents and a few US airstrikes - all portrayed as good light-hearted fun - and some cringe-worthy sparring between former lovers Morton and Halsey, we eventually uncover the grave itself.

It’s a very unusual grave, we are told, with an air of menacing mystery, because it’s Egyptian  - but located miles away from Egypt. It’s got a perfectly preserved “canal system” and a deep pool of glistening, liquid mercury. It’s been designed, Halsey tells us, slowly, not to aid a journey to the afterlife, but to keep something trapped inside.

In fact, it isn’t a tomb at all. It’s... a prison. Cruise’s reaction to this information is to cavalierly fire off a shot, unleashing an ancient pulley system, and causing a grim-faced sarcophagus to rise from the pool. Bingo.

In all fairness to the filmmakers, while nothing that follows feels remotely original, no one watching could complain of being short-changed on the “packing stuff in” front. There are flocks of possessed birds. There’s an England (the American leads end up there, following a plane crash partly caused by the aforementioned birds) where everyone says “sodding” and “wanker”, and The Kaiser Chief’s I Predict A Riot is playing full blast in the pubs. There’s an army of Crusader knights, uncovered during excavations for a new London Underground tunnel.

There’s Russell Crowe, as Dr Jekyll, and Russell Crowe doing a sort of demented Victorian Cockney impression as Mr Hyde. There’s a subplot involving Morton’s murdered army friend, who sporadically appears, in a decayed state, to warn his buddy that he is cursed. (This feels less like an American Werewolf in London reference, and more like a bad pastiche.) And there are some oddly sadistic scenes in which Ahamnet is chained up, but manages to escape with the help of some more magical creepy crawlies. It’s all patently ridiculous - and surprisingly watchable.

Perhaps the real problem, ultimately, is the characters themselves. The reason the Marvel shared universe, which took years to build up, works, is because all of its superheroes feel engagingly human: fully-formed characters we actually want to spend time with. Here, the writing is one-note, and the leads little more than placeholders.

Universal’s monster franchise has made it out of the tomb, just about  - but if this rebirth is going to sustain itself long term, it’s going to need a little more meat under its bandages. 

 Read full review at Telegraph

Movie Rating ★✬☆☆☆  

Neither Tom Cruise nor Russell Crowe can revive this tired, tedious

reboot

Jake Wilson

"We live today – we shall live again," reads an imaginary Egyptian scroll cited at the start of Universal Pictures' original 1932 The Mummy. Its authors spoke truer than they knew, although this latest remake or reboot (does anyone truly know the difference?) feels less alive than undead.

While the nominal director is veteran hack screenwriter Alex Kurtzman​ (Transformers), this Mummy has been revived by a corporation rather than an individual, for all too evident strategic purposes – launching Universal's inanely named Dark Universe of interlinked supernatural adventures, and supplying one more vehicle for the preserved boyishness of Tom Cruise, whose career could use a reboot of its own.

Still an eccentrically appealing actor, Cruise seems handicapped by his determination to remain a top box-office draw: it's been a while since he was willing to work with filmmakers as adventurous as Paul Thomas Anderson or Stanley Kubrick. His poker-faced performance in the most recent Jack Reacher sequel was a step in the right direction, but as the adventurer Nick Morton he's back to grinning and chortling in his usual defensive parody of amusement. To be sure, the character is painted as a morally ambiguous jerk, but there's little sense we're meant to find him other than delightful.

Though not precisely progressive, the original Mummy could be understood as a fable about the dangers of cultural appropriation, not a theme Kurtzman or his co-writers care to update in any thoughtful way. This is the anti-Wonder-Woman, flaunting its disdain for political correctness – most obviously in the conception of the two female leads, with Wallis as a virtuous blonde representative of latter-day Empire and Boutella as an "exotic" femme fatale who personifies physical and moral rot.

Kurtzman is plainly far less interested in commenting on the real world than he is in echoing earlier movies, the British setting for much of the action seemingly prompting memories of An American Werewolf in London. The incestuous vibe is reinforced by the "shared universe" conceit, which entails loading up the dialogue with plugs for envisaged sequels before the audience has the chance to decide if it even wants them.

Saddled with the chore of delivering most of this bonus exposition is Russell Crowe in full patrician mode as a 21st-century edition of Dr Henry Jekyll, peering blandly over half-moon spectacles in between occasional transformations into the thuggish, Cockney-accented Hyde. In reality, Crowe is two years younger than Cruise – but where Cruise has kept himself in buff action hero shape, Crowe, to put it mildly, has not. Given the talky tedium of their scenes together, the hint of tension this brings to the subtext is more than welcome.

 Read full review at Sydney morning Herald

Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆ 

‘The Mummy’ is an ominous introduction to a new movie universe

Stephanie Merry  

Given that “Spider-Man” is getting its third reboot since 2002, it’s a small miracle that Universal waited as long as it did to resurrect 1999’s wildly successful sleeper hit “The Mummy.” In the midst of franchise mania, the studio is launching its very own universe of monster flicks, and the Tom Cruise-led action thriller heralds the start of a world that may include “The Bride of Frankenstein,” “The Invisible Man” and “The Wolfman,” to name a few.

That’s some pressure the movie doesn’t shoulder well, considering it’s hardly the unqualified success of other trial balloons, like “Iron Man,” “X-Men” or even “Man of Steel.” In fact, “The Mummy” might make a viewer wonder whether this universe will even take off at all.

It won’t be for a lack of star power.

Some of the action is thrilling, especially a brilliantly choreographed plane crash that has Nick and Jenny tossed around the cabin before he straps her into a parachute and pulls the cord, whisking her out into the sky. The movie also has a few genuinely funny moments. When the mummy ominously runs her long nails over Nick’s torso, he starts giggling; he’s ticklish, apparently.

But the big thrills and few laughs are no match for the cumbersome, convoluted story, not to mention the nonexistent chemistry between Cruise and Wallis. (We’re not going to pin the blame on her considering the way her connection with Cillian Murphy popped off the screen in “Peaky Blinders.”)

The whole thing culminates in an underwater chase scene that’s painfully lugubrious. After the fast-paced thrills of the “Fast & Furious” franchise, among other action movies, seeing Cruise breaststroke away from some zombies is bizarre and comical. If something is in fact being launched with “The Mummy,” it’s not off to a very snappy start.

Read full review at Washington Post

Movie Rating ★☆☆☆☆ 

Tom Cruise stricken with a pain in the sarcophagus

Michael Phillips 

There's a lot riding on "The Mummy." Universal Pictures has laid out an entire interconnected league of monster franchises to follow the reboot opening this week. (It's already big in South Korea.) Johnny Depp's signed on for "The Invisible Man." Russell Crowe will headline a Jekyll and Hyde act, which is introduced in "The Mummy." Javier Bardem is on deck as Frankenstein's Monster. "The Bride of Frankenstein" will be followed by everything from the Creature from the Black Lagoon to a new Phantom of the Opera to a fresh Dracula and a souped-up and no doubt extremely buff Hunchback of Notre Dame.

These titles are golden, and despite the 19th-century literary roots of several of these, the economic impetus comes from Universal's legendary 1930s horror classics, the stuff of silvery nitrate nightmares. All the sadder, then, that director Alex Kurtzman's "Mummy" movie starring Tom Cruise is terrible — more calamitous and grating than any of the 1999-2008 "Mummy" outings by a wide margin. I haven't had this little fun at an SSM (Stupid Summer Movie) in several summers, though full disclosure: I have yet to see "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales." Maybe in the next life. Wouldn't that be something? If we died and then came back as film critics assigned to a purgatorial rotation of "Pirates of the Caribbean" sequels?

The idea, I think, with "The Mummy" was to give unfamiliar audiences every kind of modern, effects-heavy horror fantasy in one. Cruise plays Nick, wisecracking American belligerence incarnate, and therefore, in 2017 America, at least, an instant turnoff. He's a U.S. Army soldier with a sideline as a soldier of fortune, ripping off precious artifacts for resale while ripping off Indiana Jones so blatantly that he might as well be called Indiana Smith.

Co-star Crowe drew the short straw and, in reams of introductory voice-over narration that may still be going on, he explains the background.

The script is genuinely confused in the way it doles out information, and keeps looping back into Nick's visions of ancient Egypt. As an established screenwriter, second-time feature filmmaker Kurtzman knows his way around several brand names ("Transformers," "Star Trek," "Spider-Man"). But his facility with digitally swathed action is routine at best, visual chaos at worst. The mayhem in "The Mummy" feels desperate, mistimed, grueling in the wrong way (the film's violence is infinitely less appropriate for preteens than that of "Wonder Woman"). And in the climactic scenes of London half-destroyed by supernatural terrorists, it's also a sad victim of bad timing.

I never thought I'd miss Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz's wide-eyed facility with droll camp quite so much. I liked two things about "The Mummy." The design idea and digital execution of the mummy's eyes, both sporting two separate pupils, works nicely. And the way Crowe pronounces the phrase "the past," which goes past "the past" all the way into "the pust," really is stunning. Now that's an upper-crust dialect! The rest of the movie is a pain in the sarcophagus. I fear that it will anger the gods.

Read full review at Chicago tribune

Tom Cruise's 'The Mummy' Is An Undead Relic

Scott Mendelson  

The good news is that The Mummy is cheap enough ($125 million) that it doesn't have to be a World War Z-level blowout in order to make a profit.

In comparison to the 1930's and 1940's versions of The Mummy, the 1999 remake was indeed a quantum leap in terms of production value, spectacle and adventure. But big-budget filmmaking hasn't really progressed all that much from the late 1990s, so even at its best, this new Mummy is less a bold reinvention than a companion piece. If it were better, that would be less of an issue. Alex Kurtzman's The Mummy is a prime example of what Hollywood is going to have to deal with as they continue to mine their older hits and past-tense properties for new franchises. Since the prior versions already exist in high-quality home-viewing formats, audiences will have a choice to either see this new version in a theater or, especially if Spider-Man 1.0 is better than Spider-Man 3.0, introduce their kids to the prior versions.

To be fair, The Mummy is certainly a different beast than either Karl Freund's original or the Stephen Sommers revamps. It starts out as a mediocre early-1990s-era action-adventure movie before settling down into something approaching smaller-scale horror.

This is Tom Cruise's picture and the film suffers from his relatively recent inability to not be the best person in the room in any given situation. Aside from offering exposition, Jenny exists to be saved from peril and to reassure everyone that Nick is, at heart, a good person and worthy of redemption. There is a frustrating virgin/whore dynamic at play with the only two female characters in the movie, with Boutella presented as a hyper-sexualized demon (lots of male gaze moments and backside nudity) while Haisley presents a more conventionally chaste "appropriate" love interest. Johnson's sidekick Chris is a stock cowardly/questioning sidekick, but he is a lot more fun when (slight first-act spoiler) he becomes an undead avatar constantly bugging Nick about his would-be destiny. Beyond that, the only major character of note is Russell Crowe, who briefly shows up in the prologue before taking center stage toward the end of the second act.

The good news is that Crowe's Dr. Jekyll offers so much ham that it almost qualifies as anti-Semitic. The bad news is that he mostly serves to turn much of the third act into a backdoor pilot for Hellboy League of Extraordinary Gentlemen the whole Dark Universe thing. Much of the end of the second act/beginning of the third act sets up the Prodigium organization, which is Dark Universe's version of S.H.I.E.L.D. The banter between Crowe and Cruise is among the film's highlights, but (no spoilers) the Prodigium turn out to be very, very bad at their jobs. Their entry-level stupidity sets the finale into motion, a finale which includes a large, trailer-friendly special effects sequence that presumably causes countless deaths and is otherwise at odds with the mostly grounded horror tale. It's the most disconnected spectacle moment in a big movie since Bruce Willis fought a jet in Live Free or Die Hard. But, again, all of this is surface-level entertaining.

Without going into details, the movie deflates itself, fatally so, in the final moments (if you want to skip the next two sentences just to be safe, I won't be offended). The need to both exist as a kickoff to a cinematic universe and exist as a cinematic universe with a future role for Tom Cruise absolutely kills what should be the logical finale of a stand-alone movie. Without going into details, the film ends with a mountain of patronizing emotional exposition while leaving at least one major character with a rather undefined destiny. I'm not one to rant about how cinematic universes are killing blockbusters or what-have-you, but The Mummy is a movie that genuinely hurts itself in order to establish the bedrock of whatever comes next. It is again worth reminding everyone just how stand-alone Iron Man and Man of Steel happened to be. The connective tissue should have been saved for the end credits.

Without comparing it too much to the last Mummy trilogy, it should be noted that those films were enjoyable not because of the special effects or even the plot, but rather because Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz and Oded Fehr played genuinely fun characters whom you wanted to spend time with amid otherwise run-of-the-mill action theatrics. This time, we've got Tom Cruise's generic action man and Annabelle Wallis's generic tag-along girl and little else beyond Crowe's scenery-chewing to entertain us. While this new film stands apart from its predecessors and tries to be a grimmer horror tale, it is hobbled by thin characters and a PG-13 rating. This movie is too scary/violent for young kids anyway (that's not a criticism), so they should have just gone for the R-rating. At least the idea of a $100 million+, R-rated Tom Cruise Mummy movie would have stood out among PG-13 biggies.

So where does this leave the movie?  It starts pretty badly and then coasts well enough on its own grounded and horror-centric terms for about an hour before collapsing into a puddle of cinematic-universe-driven indecision. It starts badly and it ends worse, which is a problem for word-of-mouth. Tom Cruise is ill-suited to the role, offering little more than his trademark intensity and the always-present notion that he's playing a character about 20-years younger than his actual age. He seems to be mostly an actor-f0r-hire this time out, with little of his patented quality control that made even something like Jack Reacher into a hard-boiled winner, but he's still an engaging screen presence. Crowe is fun and Boutella sells the hell out of a mostly mute or subtitled role. The film works when it's just trying to be a horror movie as opposed to an action spectacle or a backdoor pilot to a larger world, but it again falls victim to the notion that there are other, better versions of this story available in relatively recent incarnations.

It's (barely) worth seeing unless you're in the mood for what it's selling, and it looked just fine in IMAX 3D. But it's not the glorious kickoff that Universal's Dark Universe arguably required. The film's core problem over the long run is that, in the future, when I decide I want to watch a mummy movie, I probably won't choose this one. Oh, and to my knowledge, there are no other Universal monster cameos in the film. If Johnny Depp's Invisible Man made a cameo, I didn't see him.

Read full review at Forbes