The Mummy (2017) - Not as bad as people make out, but I can see why it failed

Wouldn't it be great to see Iron Man fight it out with Captain America?  Of course it would!  And it was!  Which is just one reason that 'shared universes' are so popular (and financially successful!) these days.  I'm guessing that the film studio 'Universal Pictures' saw the success Disney was having with their superhero movies and thought they'd do a bit of 'shared universe' creating.  Only with old monsters.  And lo the 'Monsterverse' was born.  And, after 2017's 'The Mummy,' it's pretty much as dead as its titular star.  Shame really.

Despite having mega-star Tom Cruise as the lead, 'The Mummy' bombed at the Box Office.  I didn't watch it at the cinema, but I was well aware that it didn't make enough money to guarantee the various other movies the studio were planning, i.e. all those others with 'classic' monsters such as Frankenstein and the Invisible Man etc.

However. now I've seen it on DVD I actually quite liked it.  It's certainly not as bad as many make out and yet the reasons it flopped are all apparent.  First of all, if it just did its best to tell a story then it might be a lot 'tighter.' As it was, it spends a great deal of time giving us - the audience - a hell of a lot of backstory and exposition as to the 'world' the characters are living in.  It's about two hours long and I'd say that every quarter of an hour, the story grinds to a halt in order to one character to drone on about something which could have been cut, but has only been included because it relates to films that haven't even been made yet.

Secondly, 'The Mummy' was already made in 1999, starring Brendon Fraser.  Yes, many argued that it was a 'poor man's Indiana Jones' rip-off.  And they'd be right.  However, it was just so damn fun that many people seemed to forgive the likeness and just enjoy munching popcorn to it.  Plus, despite being released about twenty years ago, its special effects have aged well and hold up just fine when compared to this new version.  In short... the audience had its 'Mummy' film and we didn't really want another one so similar so soon.

But, saying all that, I did enjoy what was there.  Tom Cruise has proven himself time and time again that's he's more than capable of carrying a film on his shoulders and he does that here (even if he does take more punishment than all his 'Mission Impossible' films put together and still get up again without so much as a bruise!).  He has a 'love interest' who I will call 'love interest.' Not the actress' fault.  She does her best with what's there, but is only really there for Tom to save.  Russell Crowe pops up as 'Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde' to (a) deliver exposition and (b) you guessed it... set up his own film in the universe.  The real star is the mummy herself.  Sofia Boutella smoulders (sometimes literally!) as the villain of the piece and can even manage to upstage Tom himself when she hisses her way on screen.

Overall, if you like Tom Cruise and you're into anything from big budget action films to supernatural, er, action films (yes, there's plenty of action - some good CGI and some not so good) it's worth a watch, especially now it's on DVD and you can skip the bits that are basically 'filler' for what was meant to come, but probably never will now.

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that