Tom Cruise dances with the undead

Of all the CGI-ed supernatural forces slung in Alex Kurtzman's "The Mummy," none can compete with the spectral spectacle of Tom Cruise, at 54.

He and his abs are almost creepily ageless. So it's almost fitting that in one of the typically bonkers scenes in "The Mummy," Cruise awakes naked and unscathed alongside cadavers in a morgue, where he bewilderedly removes the tag attached to his toe. Indefatigable and un-killable, Cruise really is the undead. He's like the anti-Steve Buscemi.

Yet Cruise and "The Mummy" are a poor fit, and not the good kind, like "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein." 

There's plenty of standard, cocky Cruise leading man stuff here: running, swimming, daredevil airplane acrobatics, more running. But his relentless forward momentum is sapped by the convoluted monster mishmash that engulfs "The Mummy," a movie conceived and plotted like the monster version of Marvel. Increasingly, Cruise - like big-budget movies, themselves - is running in circles.

He plays Nick Morton, a roguish Army sergeant who plunders antiquities from Iraq with his partner Chris Vail (Jake Johnson). In a remote village they, along with archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), unearth a giant Egyptian tomb bathed in mercury. 

In it lies the Egyptian princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) who was mummified alive (imagine that wrapping job) after trying to unleash the evil Egyptian god of Set while killing her Pharaoh father, his second wife and the newborn baby that would deny her the throne. Naturally, she's going to get loose.

Hers and other backstories are shown as "The Mummy" stumbles out of its grave, vainly trying to organize the story around two burial sites (the other is in London), the strange visions that...