The team starts to dig, hoping to find lost riches, but instead they disturb the tomb of Imhotep, and soon the cursed priest rises from his grave to wreck vengeance on humanity. In 1925, a band of adventurers seeking fame and fortune - led by Rick O'Connel (Brendan Fraser), an American expatriate who has joined the foreign legion, and Evelyn Carnarvon (Rachel Weisz), an amateur archeologist - find a previously unknown burial site in Egypt. Driven mad by jealousy and love, Imhotep murdered the Pharaoh, and his punishment was to be buried alive and suffer the torment of an eternal life in his wretched tomb.
However, Imhotep made one terrible mistake - he became smitten with Anck-Su-Namun, the mistress of the Pharaoh himself. Who’ll pay to see them is anyone’s guess.Loosely adapted from the classic 1932 horror film starring Boris Karloff, The Mummy is set in Egypt, where over 3,000 years ago the high priest Imhotep (played by Arnold Vosloo) was given the all-important assignment of preparing the recently dead for their journey into the afterlife. It all ends – inevitably, crushingly – with the promise of further adventures. It’s up to one-man charisma factory Cruise to save the day! Which he does, sort of – an extended scene of Tom being beaten bloody in a Crossrail tunnel is by far the most entertaining part of the film (though a brief set-to with some swimming zombies is also memorable). The cast of the film consists of Tom Cruise, Annabelle Wallis, Sofia Boutella, Jake Johnson, Courtney B. So, the action scenes are perfunctory, the special effects are lame and the script is pure audience-insulting garbage, offering zero character development and about three decent one-liners. The Mummy is an American action-adventure film directed by Alex Kurtzman, based/remake on the 1999 film The Mummy by Stephen Sommers. He also trades flirtatious quips with historical scholar Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis – 22 years his junior), and has a brief tussle with the evil alter-ego of prestigious professor Dr Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe, whose CG-enhanced Mr Hyde make-up is laughable). It’s then on to London, where the Cruiser survives a plane crash and learns that his leathery bod been chosen by the Mummy, aka Pharaonic Princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), to act as the earthly vessel for Set, the God of death. This time our hero is Nick Morton (Tom Cruise), a wisecracking US Army loose cannon and part-time tomb raider who stumbles upon a buried mausoleum in Iraq – hang on, Iraq? Yes, in a barefaced effort to curry favour with the guns ’n’ ammo crowd, ‘The Mummy’ offers the baffling notion that the ancient Egyptians decided to bury the titular demon squarely in ISIS country, allowing Tom to look good running with a machine gun and cap a few jabbering jihadis in the process. If you’ve seen either the 1932 or 1999 versions of the story, you already know the basics: an arrogant Western archaeologist digs up an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus its entombed inhabitant reanimates and runs rampant. It’s a big, bold fanfare of intent – after which the film itself feels like one long, wet raspberry.
This cinematic franchise we’re building, set to incorporate Dracula, Frankenstein and the Wolf Man, will be every bit as vast and sprawling as anything Marvel or DC have to offer.
We’re not messing about, the new emblem screams. In the opening frames of this murky megabudget monster mash, the famous Universal logo – a twinkling globe – revolves and dims, revealing the words ‘DARK UNIVERSE’ in glowering block capitals.