The Mummy (2017)

After sitting slack jawed through this steaming pile of buffalo feces, I was horrified to see what was following it up on Film4. As well as being abysmal, The Mummy's ignominy is worsened by defecating on our television screens mere seconds after Sergio Leone's spaghetti masterpiece, A Fistful Of Dollars (1964) had reached its glorious conclusion. Never will people scramble for their remote controls in such desperation quicker, as their homes are threatened with the invasion of a film that killed the proposed 'Dark Universe' stone dead at the first attempt. Tom Cruise is such a hugely effective screen presence it's easy to see why he was approached by Universal to spearhead what was initially billed as the inception of a series that would reproduce the old Universal Monsters classics (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man et al) alongside, in this case, Russell Crowe sporting a truly appalling cockney accent. The Mummy ended all that before it had began, and despite the fact it actually contains a rather impressive plane crash sequence, the awe factor was lost somewhat due to the Tom Cruise plane stunt he had performed in Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation two years previously. Cruise does his best here, but it's nowhere near enough to hold up a film that is so dull I would be astonished if anyone has sat through it twice; once was trying enough. Released with a 12A certificate, it almost immediately states that it's not going to be scary (The Woman in Black [2012] is an exception to this statement) and that it will almost certainly attempt to inject comedy into proceedings. Staggeringly, it manages to fail on this front as well. After the Brendon Fraser and Rachel Weisz fronted Mummy reboots (1999-2008) that were mostly successful in their attempts to mesh comedy, adventure and horror, Indian Jones style, Universal's plans to extract more of the horror from Hammer's four original Mummy films (1959-1971) and inject it into the new universe fall flatter than the thinnest of pancakes, stinking out cinemas for a mercifully short period of time and making catastrophically insufficient funds to continue the series. Thank the Lord. 2.3/10