The Mum­my

Let’s kick things off on a small note of pos­i­tiv­i­ty – which, to be frank, is equiv­a­lent to a 10-man arche­o­log­i­cal dig amid scads of dusty, indis­tinct murk. Straight up, this film does some amaz­ing things with torch tech­nol­o­gy. That’s right, torch­es. We guar­an­tee you have nev­er seen torch­es like these before. Tom Cruise plays Tom Cruise and is low­ered into a pit along with some chat­ter­ing man­nequins. It’s dark, so in order to illu­mi­nate the sur­round­ings, they break out some torch­es. As you do.

But these aren’t just nor­mal torch­es, they’re dou­ble torch­es. So two torch­es, packed togeth­er like a dou­ble-bar­rel torch. Dou­ble the torch­es, dou­ble the light. And then, Tom’s awful com­e­dy side­kick takes things up a notch, because he breaks out a quadru­ple torch. Yep – four stub­by torch­es packed togeth­er. It’s unlike any­thing you’ve ever seen in the realm of torch­es. It’s cin­e­ma right at the van­guard of torch tech­nol­o­gy, and it’s a gen­uine thrill to behold.

The remain­der of The Mum­my does not man­age to live up to the ear­ly high bar set by the super torch­es. Cruise is an advance par­ty mil­i­tary scout fight­ing the good fight in Iraq, when a bit of both­er involv­ing a sur­gi­cal air strike uncov­ers an Egypt­ian tomb con­tain­ing some real­ly bad things cov­ered in mer­cury. Untrou­bled by all the his­tor­i­cal mum­bo jum­bo being spout­ed by Annabelle Wal­lis’ dullard explor­er, Jen­ny Halsey, he breaks out his super torch, up for bit of no-strings antiq­ui­ty loot­ing, but ends up res­ur­rect­ing a 5000-year-old killer Mum­my who wants to use Cruise’s hot bod as a shell for the God of Evil.

Then there’s some run­ning around, an avi­a­tion sna­fu, and Cruise has a bizarre freak out in a pub lava­to­ry (ladies). The torch­es, though, linger in the mem­o­ry. Main­ly because much of the film is shot in a way where you can’t actu­al­ly see what’s hap­pen­ing. If any­thing, it feels like the CG tech­nol­o­gy has dimin­ished since the heady days of 1999 when Bren­dan Fras­er was tak­ing on Ancient Egypt’s finest. Most of the action here takes place at night, in tun­nels, in dim church­es, under­wa­ter or in an under­ground cav­ern – all places that real­ly could’ve done with some great torch­es. As it stands, you can’t see the facial expres­sions, you can’t see who’s doing what to whom, and you just don’t have any idea what is hap­pen­ing and why.

Despite Cruise’s best efforts to smarm up his large­ly bland and dash­ing huck­ster, the film crum­bles around him. There are plot holes, and there are also plot black holes, which seem to suck up all infor­ma­tion in the direct vicin­i­ty and instant­ly trans­port it to a ran­dom point at the oth­er end of the galaxy, nev­er to be seen again. Indeed, Cruise spends much of the film nod­ding and hold­ing his chin like a sen­tient emo­ji while he’s hav­ing the plot explained to him. He’s prob­a­bly secret­ly pon­der­ing why the hell he signed up to this thing – one of those clever actor tricks.

Play­ing the antag­o­nist, Ahmanet, is Sofia Boutel­la, and her thing is that she has to get a per­son to a place by a cer­tain time and make a sac­ri­fice with a spe­cial tool in order to unleash foul tor­ment on an unsus­pect­ing world. She looks like she’s wan­dered in from the set of a Ste­vie Nicks music video (one of the bad ones). Fans of the Tobe Hooper’s mad sci-fi epic, Life­force, may see par­al­lels in the ​“sto­ry” as both involve women suck­ing pow­er from ran­dom strangers and run­ning around Lon­don. Also, this one whiffs bad­ly of Ron Howard’s val­ue-netur­al Dan Brown adap­ta­tions, with its focus on peo­ple going to places and doing things (and con­stant­ly talk­ing about it).

The long game here was for a new mon­ster-based fran­chise mul­ti-verse which dredged up the clas­sic Uni­ver­sal Mon­sters from the vault and gave them a 21^st cen­tu­ry spit shine. If this open­ing gam­bit is any­thing to go by, two options remain: 1. send them all back to the vault where they belong and get some seri­ous direc­tors involved (guys, Guiller­mo del Toro would’ve smashed this), or 2. see how the box office pans out and aim for a hard reset, or at the very least a com­plete change of tone and tack. The only way this could pan out is for the sec­ond film in the fran­chise to be as rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent as Won­der Woman is to Bat­man V Super­man.