Nick Morton is more like an archeologist always after artifacts and sells them to the highest bidder. This time he accidentally unearths Ahmanet; a betrayed Egyptian princess who was entombed under the desert for thousands of years.
The Mummy promises a fantastical world of supernatural beings colliding and collaborating, forgetting that if no one cares about any one of these beings in particular, they're not going to be sold on seeing them together, either.
Like the 1999 Mummy, this is built around its leading man rather than its menace - but Cruise, cast as a generic redeemable rogue (ie unlikeable asshole), brings to the game less than Dick Foran did for a fraction of the cost in The Mummy's Hand (1940).
You only have to watch the trailer to know that Producer-Director Alex Kurtzman's reboot of Brendan Fraser's once-charming mummy movies is full of embalming fluid.
It has been made with skill and hits its marks. But those marks are so low and so brazenly mercenary that it doesn't feel like much of an achievement. It's not involving.
The Mummy is a mess, a movie in such a hurry to introduce more monsters under Universal's "Dark Universe" banner that it comes awkwardly wrapped in impenetrable layers of exposition.
I was curious enough about Universal's decision to exhume its classic monsters to hold on until the zombie crusader frogmen started swimming after amoral (but maybe-redeemable) soldier of fortune Tom Cruise. No one would blame you for checking out sooner.
In the end, the 2017 version mostly makes one yearn for the 1999 reboot... It isn't all bad, though... Tom makes getting beat down look believably good.
As the beginning of an ongoing series, it's an utter bore, one with only the faintest grasp of what made Universal's monster pictures so iconic all those decades ago.
