You may find yourself, as Talking Heads might have said, watching this animated feature about dead yet ambulatory mummified ancient Egyptians capering about some weird version of London. And you may ask yourself, not only how did you get here when the oracle warned you not to go, but what did you do in a past life to deserve this?
You may also ask yourself all sorts of questions about the simple logic of this very poorly written and ill-considered film. Such as: why do the mummy characters look like regular humans most of the time except in certain kinds of light which make them look like trick-or-treaters wearing bad skeleton makeup? How did they magically get back from our world to their underworld land of the mummy dead at the end of the film with such ease, given it was supposed to be so challenging in the first act? Why does the villain – a crazed museum curator named Lord Carnaby (Hugh Bonneville) – have such a weird obsession with his mother (Celia Imrie, who like Bonneville is turning a cheap voiceover trick presumably for the money)? How did the heroine, a mummy princess named Nefer (Eleanor Tomlinson), who apparently aspires to be an undead Ariana Grande with a bobbed hairstyle, suddenly learn to sing Walk Like an Egyptian? And why doesn’t she find the lyrics offensive, being a real Egyptian?
Film-makers seem to think any old brightly coloured nonsense is good enough to be shovelled out to cinemas for the kiddiewinks over the Easter holidays, but this one is a war crime. Not only is it as derivative as chatbot-written free verse, it’s also not even pleasant to look at. Walk like an Egyptian very quickly away from the multiplex.
• Mummies is released on 31 March in cinemas.
