The Mummy review – cursed by cliche

Of all the mouldering franchise corpses to reanimate, The Mummy is probably the one that is least open to new ideas. Certain plot elements are immutable. There will be sand, lashed into a frenzy somewhere around the first act climax. There will be cocky adventurers whose greed will blind them to danger until the point when it is chewing their faces off. There will be some kind of significant amulet, in this case a sacrificial dagger that should have been used on this project long before the CGI knob-twiddlers got their hands on the first green-screen action sequence. And there will be an ancient evil whose wrath has festered during the centuries it has spent interred.

For this wholly unnecessary reboot of the series, the film-makers have called upon an Egyptian plague of slightly ropey special effects and a handful of A-list stars. Tom Cruise is Nick Morton, a treasure-hunting American soldier who finds himself chosen to be the mate of Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), a patricidal demon princess. And Russell Crowe takes a role that has been cannibalised from an entirely different property – he plays Dr Jekyll, now rebranded as the leader of a covert band of renegade archaeologists. No amount of clunky expository dialogue can untangle this mess of bones, bandages and bald commercial cynicism.