The Daddy was not pleased.

It’s been a week since the Mummy returned for the 234676th time on the big screen. Why remake this of all things now? Well it seems that Universal Studios have pretty much gambled all by committing themselves to creating what they are calling the “Dark Universe”. Think of all those comic book things from Disney and Warner Bros, but with Monsters like Frankenstein, Dracula and Barney the Purple Dinosaur.

Because they’re making money hand over fist despite questionable quality of film at the time, it seems Universial are pretty much just jumping on the bandwagon while the going is good. Why do I say that? Because damned if I can think of any other reason why this remake exists. On the face of it, it could have been a nice easy route into exploring this tried and tested world with new twists, turns and various other threads. Be standalone, give a taste of what’s to come and then leave us wanting more. The mistake of not really rushing things through was made by DC and Warner Bros with Batman Vs Superman. Sadly not only do they make that mistake here, it’s borderline much worse.

The whole monster movie concept was always a bit of horror / b-movie cheese, and the last series with the wee scamps of Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz were actually not too shabby as that went. Some good humour, some neat special effects and ridiculous setups made for some decent entertainment back in the day. Of course it did disappear up it’s own arse with the Scorpion King and that third film that I don’t know what happened in that one for sure, certainly not without looking it up. It did though have some wonderful choices in terms of the time period which made it more interesting, the 1920s.

This version though, chucks that all out the window in favour of being set in the modern day. Apparently some knights in shining armour back in the day took a ruby and buried it in merry ol London, just in time for Crossrail Engineers to uncover it all and bring Russel Crowe into the picture. He’s here to give you all the backstory in the film, so have 5 minutes to explain that the Mummy lady did bad things and got buried. But don’t worry kids, he’ll be back later to tell us more.

Cut to our dashing hero Nick (Tom Cruise) who is a happy go lucky army dude who seems that have gotten the idea from the film “Three Kings” to go and steal stuff in the middle east while fighting goes on. He has a comic relief friend who frankly gets on your t*ts after about 10 seconds, played by Jake Johnson. After some explosions and random silly jokes, a hole opens up in the ground and bugger me if they don’t find the Mummy’s burial place.

While Russell Crowe tells us about the plot, Tom Cruise looks into the camera, knowing it was too late to walk away. Then again, he has paid off that microwave he bought from Currys thanks to this film.

Along comes the lady expert who happens to also be attractive and English; Jennifer Halsey played by Annabelle Wallis though honestly the performance was probably just so she could pay for her kitchen and then add an extension to the house for the coming sequels. They get the Mummy out, onto a plane when it all goes wrong and the plane crashes with Tom Cruise then apparently being undead and seeing his friend turn up saying stuff because he’s in his head now. It all makes perfect sense. Honest.

A few scares here and there, the Mummy starts doing naughty in London, we see Russell Crowe again explaining more stuff and of course showing us the set-up for the whole Dark Universe thing along with having his own problems to deal with (trust me, when his character’s name comes up, you’ll groan.) Lots more stuff with corpses, fights and stuff happens in the end, and of course we have the set-up for the possible next series of films to come, depending on if Universial really are going to push ahead with this whole thing.

As you can imagine, I did have a few good laughs during this film as the B-Movie cheese was indeed overflowing as you might expect. But the laughter came from just ridiculous moments of which, when you see them, you’ll just give up any hope of this being good. Maybe in a few years, we’ll see if this was “The Room” levels of good-bad film, but right now, they’ve got problems.

A ton of exposition at two points will leave you slightly bored, Russel Crowe’s not gotten much better at English accents, the lady expert basically just turns into the damsel in not really much distress and Tom Cruise spends have the film just dumbfounded that he agreed to be in this. Sofia Boutella, is alright as the Mummy herself but doesn’t really have to do that much truth be told. Even the special effects didn’t really bring much excitement to the mix, and as I said before, they tried to force the Dark Universe stuff in way too early and it’s kind of put me off wanting to see any more efforts in the near future. Seems it could also be ol’ Tom’s fault that this turned out the way it did…..

Campers, this is pretty much an open and shut case; don’t bother with this one. Try the original Mummy from the 1930s or indeed revisit the more recent version set back in the 20s if you want some Mummy Fun. Failing that, watch a ton of MILF videos on PornHub. Shop around Mothercare for nappies. Basically do anything else mummy related than watch this.