The Mummy

The desire to get a big box-office multi-film franchise has often obsessed studios. Even more so, now, the desire to do the Marvel thing where films are connected in a universe, even if they may not maintain the same characters, actors or creative crew - something that compels the audience to keep on coming back. THe problem, of course, is that the audience actually has to like the movie in the first place to keep on coming back for more.

This doesn't seem to be the fate for "The Mummy", Universal's attempt to launch a "Dark Universe" imprint that will have all the famous Universal monsters in it, crossing over and appearing in each other's films. The major downside, that apart from the Creature from the Black Lagoon, virtually all the characters are out of copyright, doesn't appear to have bothered anyone unduly. Launching with the franchise that was itself most recently successfully remade, "The Mummy", is perhaps more troublesome. While the 90s/2000s Brendan Fraser/Rachel Weitz Mummy movies were cheesy as hell, they had a certain easy-going matinee charm to them, And being set in the late 20s/early 30s certainly helped to take the odium off the Heroic White Saviour Against Brown-Skinned People - if it's set back before people knew any better, you can get away with a lot.

Tom Cruise has very obviously been seriously working on his body for this film - his musculature makes plenty of appearances. Unfortunately, he hasn't been intervening on the script, which feels a little ropey, particualrly in the first thirty minutes or so. His hero is meant to be one of those slightly-dodgy-fortune-hunters-who-will-be-redeemed, and in this case, Cruise tends to come off as more of a douchebag than may have been intended. Still, once the action moves out of modern Iraq and into England, things improve markably. Sophia Boutella's mummy runs free and threatening, and Cruise gets some invulnerability that means that Boutella can beat the crap out of him while some ill-defined material about his destiny works its way out. Russell Crowe gets to play professor exposition and has a pleasant sense of whimsy about him, and the final chase actually gets quite fun (although the last couple of scenes feel grotesquely like they simultaneously want to set up a sequel and don't want to commit themselves as to what that sequel may involve.

This has got a lot of international indifference and critical hatred, but I'll be honest and say despite my better instincts I did enjoy some of the verve in this film - no, it's not spectacular but it's not quite the cinematic abortion some may have painted it as. I had a reasonable amount of thrills.