I may have been too hard on Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales when I reviewed it, fresh out of the cinema, in a fit of rage a couple of weeks ago. It was pretty bad and I did find the attempts to carbon-copy Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley’s characters from the first three films to be quite pathetic, but at least that film didn’t flat-out insult my intelligence like The Mummy did. Supposedly this film now holds the honour of being Tom Cruise’s most successful international opening weekend ever, but I attribute that to the film opening simultaneously in many foreign territories (which is rare, usually international releases are staggered between countries) and not to the quality of the film itself, because this film does nothing that you haven’t seen another film (in some cases, another Tom Cruise film) do better and in many respects it completely fails at doing anything well.

Chief among its many problems is the fact that this movie is still operating under the impression that Tom Cruise is irresistible, both to women (even the undead ones!) and to moviegoing audiences. We’ll discuss the chick magnet thing later because it’s problematic as fuck and deserves its own paragraph - but if we’ve learned anything from the past few Mission: Impossible films and from recent films like Edge of Tomorrow for which Cruise has been praised, it’s that on his own he is not necessarily the key to a good film these days. Surround Tom Cruise with good characters and a story that took longer than twenty minutes to write, and you probably have something good in the works, but he cannot shoulder the burden alone. Plenty of people have said (and will continue to say) that they will watch movies for Cruise’s performance alone, and obviously he is still a box office draw, but unfortunately Cruise doesn’t make movies like Magnolia or Collateral anymore and the kinds of movies he does make these days need more than his bizarrely youthful countenance to be above average or even competent. The Mummy is neither of those things.

It is, however, a movie where Tom Cruise has the thankless task of playing a pretty unlikeable low-rent Indiana Jones surrounded by equally unlikeable (and often two-dimensional) characters - and don’t even get me started on how painfully obvious it was that this Nick Morton character was intended to be played by an actor 20 or even 30 years younger than Cruise. I think Tom does an adequate job given the fact the character really is nothing more than a series of tropes mashed together in the writing room; he’s a mercenary who doesn’t care for anyone or anything except money - but he’s a loveable rogue because of how comical he is under pressure! - and he’s actually got a heart of gold because he saved Annabelle Wallis that one time! The protagonist is one-note and the supporting cast have zero chemistry or purpose with him (Annabelle Wallis and Russell Crowe play academics who work for Prodigium, which is an organization with the vaguely defined objective of “stopping evil”, and Wallis also serves as Nick Morton’s obligatory love interest; Jake Johnson plays the comic relief sidekick who bizarrely doesn’t stop being a comic relief sidekick even after he turns into a zombie and is supposed to be working against Morton) save for Sofia Boutella’s titular Mummy, the Egyptian princess Ahmanet - but even the normally solid Boutella is weighed down by a script that does her no favours.

Which leads me to the thing I hated most about this film, and it wasn’t even something I expected to find in this film going into it. My expectations were never high regarding this film, especially since I happen to love The Mummy (1999), but I did think that the gender-flipping of the supernatural Mummy into a woman was something that could have potential. At the very least, I figured it might offer either some comedy or interesting power dynamics in the emasculation of whatever character Cruise was playing, and I’ve also enjoyed Boutella in her previous movies (Kingsman: The Secret Service, Star Trek Beyond) so I was confident she would not disappoint. The jury is still out for me on whether that was the case. Ahmanet really doesn’t do much in this movie; half of her scenes consist of her walking towards the camera seductively (usually in smoke or mist) while giving Nick Morton sultry bedroom eyes, and the other half involve her making out with nameless dudes so that they will become zombies she can control. I’m not opposed to either of those things in and of itself, even if they are pretty eye-rolling, but the film also establishes (by way of a terrible pre-title sequence voiced by Russell Crowe) that Ahmanet only ended up becoming a mummy because she was set to become Egypt’s first female pharaoh until a baby stepbrother was born at the last minute.

It’s some sort of bizarre message about patriarchy and female subjugation in a movie where that is not only extremely out of place but completely unearned, and over the course of the rest of the film it’s undone by Ahmanet’s weird obsession with dominating and possessing the utterly uninteresting Nick Morton. In the 1999 film Imhotep’s obsession with Evelyn made sense because he had literally just spent the last several millennia thinking of his dead lover and wanting to resurrect her ASAP; in this film we’re told that Ahmanet can technically resurrect Set (the god of Evil?) in anyone to achieve full power but she just fixated upon Nick because he was the one who opened her tomb, and it’s also implied she’s sexually interested in him to some extent (she tries to kiss him while his mind was psychically linked to hers, and she mounts him at least twice). The age difference between Cruise and Boutella doesn’t help, and neither does the weird Archie/Betty/Veronica parallel that the film sets up between Cruise and his two female leads - neither of whom share any chemistry with him, so consequently we are forced to accept that Cruise is just universal vagina bait that transcends time and space. It’s actually laughable when Tom Cruise cries (twice) over Annabelle Wallis either dying or nearly dying, and simply insulting when the film tries to present his choosing her over Sofia Boutella as some sort of momentous act of love and redemption.

This is just a movie that wants to be way too many things at once and ends up failing to be anything of note. It tries to present this tragic backstory of a woman restrained by the society she happened to be born in, but it also shows that that woman will stop at nothing because of her raging desire for a 55-year-old Tom Cruise. It’s not nearly funny enough to be an action-adventure-comedy in line with the 1999 film, but in its attempts to homage some genuinely terrifying Gothic horror icons (see: Russell Crowe’s ridiculously stupid Jekyll/Hyde character) the movie shows how amateur it is at any attempt at horror. If you want to see a movie with good female characters and a story that effectively blends the old and the new and the light-hearted with the serious, go watch Wonder Woman again. I for one hope The Mummy dies a slow painful death by scarab beetle - or perhaps I’m just nostalgic for the film I should have watched instead.