What you may need to know:
1. The 2017 blockbuster previews keep coming, so here’s the Tom Cruise’s latest excuse to run fast and jump off things, The Mummy. He plays a military type charged with transporting an entombed mummy from the deserts of Egypt to London, only to find the creature (Sofia Boutella) is alive and set on causing chaos and revenge.
2. Yes, technically this is a remake of the immensely silly Indiana Jones rip-off The Mummy (1999), but it’s actually a franchise that goes all the way back to the 1930s, when the likes of Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney played the titular creature. Things got a bit out of control when Abbot & Costello got in on the act.
3. It’s a well-established fact that blockbusters and sequels aren’t enough anymore; at least four movies are required in any franchise, so Universal Pictures are getting the band back together.
4. So The Mummy is the first in a series that will see outings from Frankenstein’s monster, Count Dracula, The Wolf Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Invisible Man, Bride of Frankenstein and more.
5 Russell Crowe plays none other than Dr. Henry Jekyll, of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde. Here Jekyll is the head of Prodigium, an organisation which tracks the whereabouts of these creatures, which is presumably how the producers will crowbar those eventual team-ups off the page. They haven’t got a script yet, but they can bang one out by Friday.
6. Rather than the retro swashbuckling of the Brendan Fraser movies, or the gothic nature of, say, Penny Dreadful, this is a supernatural film set very much in the present, with what looks like the same globe-trotting antics as something like Mission: Impossible.
6. Tom Cruise seems to be giving less of a **** as he gets older. He’s got little to prove, and seems to choose roles based on what kind of stunts he gets to do. Rumour has it he actually spent a weekend in a body bag in a morgue before filming.
7. The Mummy is directed by Alex Kurtzman, the seasoned writer best known for the likes of the newer Star Trek movies. Kurtzman says he wants audiences to fall in love with each character first; if they can do that, then a world will present itself. “You have to make great individual movies, first and foremost,” he told journalists at a briefing last week. “And if you do that, then the audience will follow you.”
Verdict: The Meh-mmy.
Release date: J une 9, 2017
