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The Mummy review: Neither Tom Cruise nor Russell Crowe can revive this tired, tedious reboot

★½​
(M) 111 minutes

"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.

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The Mummy actresses Sofia Boutella and Annabelle Wallis open up about working with Tom Cruise, playing the first female Mummy and filming in zero gravity.

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.

Bizarrely, we first encounter Nick as a soldier-cum-looter in present-day Iraq, pilfering ancient artifacts to be sold online. (Like his apparent role model Indiana Jones, he has few qualms about gunning down locals, described blithely as "insurgents".) In a tight corner, Nick and his comic sidekick Chris (Jake Johnson) call in an airstrike as you might order a pizza, leading to the uncovering of the tomb of a vengeful Egyptian princess (Sofia Boutella​), buried a thousand miles from home.

The backstory to this is initially a puzzle, even to Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis) a beautiful British archeologist who joins them at the scene. Sparks don't exactly fly between Jenny and Nick, but their banter is in any case put on hold as the mummy's curse starts to take effect, first on Chris and then on Nick himself, who inexplicably escapes death in a plane crash – one of the better special-effects sequences – only to find Princess Ahmanet controlling him from afar.

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.