Lee Cronin’s The Mummy and all the images you see in this review are owned by Warner Bros Picutres
Directed by Lee Cronin
I feel like it’s been a minute since we’ve had a really good Mummy movie. Sure, they tried with that Tom Cruise movie from a few years back, but when was the last time we had a movie about a Mummy that was genuinely creepy? Has it really been since the Hammer film from the late fifties that a Mummy movie was trying to be a suspenseful horror film and not an action comedy? Thankfully, we’ve got good ol’ Blumhouse to bring these old monsters to life with small budgets; necessitating creativity and atmosphere over flashy effects and endless spectacle. Does this put the Mummy back in its rightful place as a horror icon, or is this yet another failed attempt to make the concept relevant without Boris Karloff, Peter Cushing, or Brendan Fraser? Let’s find out!!
Charlie (Jack Reynor) is an investigative reporter who’s been assigned to Cairo and brought his family along for the adventure. Of course, this being Egypt in a horror movie, one of their kids Katie (Emily Mitchell and Natalie Grace) is kidnapped and mummified. It’s not until eight years later that the sarcophagus is discovered and Katie is miraculously still alive, though seems to be in pretty rough shape. Unable to talk, walk, or even eat on her own, Charlie and his wife Larissa (Laia Costa) decide to take her home to the US and see if some bedrest will fix her horrifying condition. Needless to say that there’s more going on than just dehydration and sunburns, and things start to go wild as Katie awakens to whatever power the mummification had granted her. Why was Katie chosen to be mummified, and is there anything left of Katie now that she’s free from her bindings? What horrors will this family contend with in trying to save their daughter from whatever malevolent force is driving her? Is it just me, or does this sound nothing like a Mummy movie? Did an intern mix up a couple different scripts and no one even noticed?
At the risk of giving away my opinion before we even properly get into the review, I had no idea what I was walking into, and five seconds of research would have told me that the titular Lee Cronin was the same guy who made that Evil Dead movie I completely bounced off of. I just thought they were doing some sort of elevated horror thing where they associate it with a famous director while also getting around the fact that there are already half a dozen movies with this title, so I went into this hoping for a classy mummy story and instead got… well, a Lee Cronin movie. Now unless a movie is genuinely contemptable, I make a conscious effort to not be hyperbolic in my criticism as we have enough smug jerks on the internet talking about movies, but I cannot be anything but blunt here; this movie is terrible. Perhaps not incompetent, though some of the choices here are utterly baffling, but terrible nonetheless.
I may not have enjoyed the most recent Evil Dead movie, but at the very least, that felt like someone trying to make an Evil Dead movie. This, on the other hand, feels like an Evil Dead movie pretending to be something else, and that’s a shame because I was in the mood for a proper mummy movie! Instead, this just hits the same beats as Evil Dead Rise and simply does a find and replace in the script from deadite to mummy. Whatever you associate with mummy movies, whether you prefer the Brendan Fraser action mummies, the classical Boris Karloff drama mummies, or the Universal and Hammer creature mummies, you aren’t gonna find it here. Sure, there is always room for interpretation whenever it comes to fictional monsters like this, but there are certain advantages to those associates and this movie just throws them away to just let Cronin run completely wild. Egyptian Mummies are interesting because they are some of the more human monsters out there. Much like vampires, they are often symbols of the aristocracy; either humans of high status made a shadow of their former selves or servants of the former forced to carry out their bidding. There is so much material to work with there while still making a creepy and dread inducing horror film, but instead we’re just rehashing the deadite shtick and are trying way too hard to be shocking and gross. The movie affected me, I suppose, by being so repellant, but I’m not about to give it a standing ovation for being unpalatable.
Even if we look beyond its utter crassness, there’s little to recommend here. It has one well executed scene towards the end where we witness a mummification ritual, but beyond that, it’s loud and obnoxious when it isn’t dull and pedestrian. I don’t want to harp too much on our main actor as he’s been in other stuff and I doubt anything in this was his fault specifically, but he gives one of the worst performances I’ve seen in a while. He’s either rotely reciting his boring dialogue or he’s staring boggle-eyed at the camera in a way that is always comical; especially when the actor playing his wife is acting circles around him. What few dramatic moments of grief and heartbreak they put in here are entirely undermined when we then cut to this gormless dude with a dopey expression on his face, but then I’d be as bewildered too if I had to follow the plot of this which is incoherent in the worst way for a horror movie to be. Not only are our protagonists acting irrationally to justify the silly premise of the movie, there’s no motivation for the villainous force beyond being a jerk. They don’t seem to want anything specific or show any amount of struggle as they have a wildly disparate and overwhelming set of powers, and without any of push or pull from either side, where can there possibly be any tension? I’m just as baffled as the dad, and I even got to see the stuff that he wasn’t there for!
Maybe this style of in-your-face horror works for you, but even if you were a fan of his last movie, I think you’d at least find this to be a disappointing repeat of that shtick. It’s not without some notable moments, but it never feels fresh or original; even when it’s trying to provoke you. This is the kind of movie I just hate to see because I know what works about it, but I simply cannot get behind it and leave the theater feeling like the movie has taken something away from me; whether it’s my time, my patience, or just my good mood. It’s a definite and obvious skip from me, and I’d wager most of you won’t have a great time with it either. Maybe they should try again, but this time put an actual mummy in it. Seems like a foolproof formula for me, but what do I know; other than what the word Mummy means?
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