The latest attempt to launch a trendy, lucrative "Cinematic Universe" (Oy...), The Mummy is a hellzapoppin' F/X jamboree that's so chaotically overstuffed with "entertainment value" that it forgets to breathe, or even craft a coherent narrative arc. Tom Cruise, with his ageless athleticism and glib jocularity, is an odd choice to anchor the kind of film that should be shrouded in a hushed atmosphere of creeping dread but instead leaps about with cobbled-together propulsiveness. The "story", as such (credited to no less than five screenwriters), is so jumbled and obviously pasted together from half-a-dozen drafts that you can practically hear the Lego bricks being snapped into place in your head as the film keeps cutting away from the obligatory raided tombs and moldering, re-animated cadavers to showcase Russell Crowe (giving the film a winning dose of bemused good humor) as Dr. Henry Jeckyll, a lifelong monster-hunter so obviously modelled on Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury he may as well have been sporting an eyepatch. Soufia Boutella (from Kingsman: The Secret Service and Star Trek Beyond), with her designer tats and striking double-irises, makes for a yummy mummy, and the film has flashes of atmosphere and wit, and yet, like too many of these putting-the-cart-before-the-horse wannabe-franchise kickstarters, The Mummy comes across as crass, artless and too hellbent on setting up future chapters to bother providing an adequate amount of fun or frights for the movie you're watching right NOW.
Paltry $2.7 million Thrs opening spells doom for this. If it doesn't crack $100 mil domestic during its run, that's a disaster, and it looks like it will struggle to top $30 mil in its opening weekend.