At his best when playing steely-eyed and unerring truthsayers, Tom Cruise as this movie's Nick Morton, a character of "troubling moral turpitude", is the first thing that is wrong with The Mummy, and the second is the movie's three disparate elements - action adventure, horror, and longwinded "Dark Universe" exposition, all presented in switching, changing fashion, a symptom of the curse affecting Universal Studio's overriding concept: like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which failed to get viewers excited about a bewildering mix of disparate literary figures (the Invisible Man, Mina Harker, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Captain Nemo, Dorian Gray, etc, all thrown together in one story), Universal Studios wants the world to get excited about a "Dark Universe" in which gods and monsters from all over hangout and cross paths and mix in a universe that Universal hopes will lead to endless blockbuster instalments, but I'd have preferred intelligent updates of individual monster classics linked together by genre alone over this already, after just one instalment, disjointed marketing exercise.
★★☆☆☆
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