Tom Cruise in The Mummy

THE MUMMY
Directed by Alex Kurtzman
Certificate 12a
☆☆☆

ASK yourself: what should be on a how-to-make-a-summer-blockbuster wish list?

Perhaps you would say a bankable lead and a gorgeous love interest, a banter-full script, a tale of derring-do, some big fat special effects and a plot that requires a minimum amount of work by the grey cells.

If you don’t expect too much from this Tom Cruise vehicle, and you have this list close to hand as the action unfolds, you’d have to be pretty sour not to stick ticks next to each category.

The action starts with a tunnelling team working on Crossrail uncovering a Crusader’s tomb. As the construction workers start to explore, in strides Dr Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe), who tells everyone they must leave and that he’s the boss now…

Then Crowe’s most learned voiceover whistles back into the past to tell us of a legend of an Egyptian Princess Ahmanet, robbed of her claim to a throne by the unexpected birth of a baby brother and how she calls on evil supernatural forces to help her commit familicide.

But before she can hoik her sculptured backside onto the throne as her father and brother lie slain, she is captured and buried alive, a long way from her home soil.

Once this scene setting has been rattled off, we zoom forward to modern day and we meet Nick (Tom Cruise) and Sergeant Vail (Jake Johnson), two US long-range reconnaissance soldiers working in Iraq. They have a sideline pillaging ancient artefacts, so when they hear from expert Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis) of a mysterious site a horse ride from where they are meant to be, they head to investigate. Obviously they get tangled up disastrously with the undead ancient, whose prison-tomb they disturb via a bunker-buster air strike, and from then on in it’s a magic/zombie/myth/action/rom-com of a flick, featuring secret societies, mummy’s curses and riddles to unwind, all set in London.

Wallis and Cruise suffer from a strange lack of chemistry, while the real star is Johnson, who spends much of the film undead and appears to offer advice like sidekick Jack in An American Werewolf In London.

Cruise swans around being Tom Cruise – it’s pretty one-dimensional stuff. He also does his best here to further the argument that male film role models are in just the same binds their female counterparts are in terms of body image – it’s so rare nowadays to get leading men anymore who don’t look like Tarzan.

There is some attempt at comedic asides, straight from the Raiders of the Lost Ark songbook and a set piece ending.

Again, it ticks the boxes, but lacks a true spark of originality to lift it out of the morass of similar flicks and give it true Raiders-style watchability.