‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ Movie Review: Stupid Script Weakens Otherwise Gnarly Familial Take On Movie Monster
Photo from Warner Bros.
From Jeremy Kibler
It has been a while since a mummy movie has actually tried to be genuinely creepy with an earned R-rating. By calling this one Lee Daniels’, er, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, it offers potential for a ghoulishly fresh take on the titular monster. It surely differentiates itself by bearing no resemblance to any past Universal Pictures incarnations (not the 1932 granddaddy with Boris Karloff, nor the Brendan Fraser-starring trilogy, and definitely not the Tom Cruise-led reboot non-starter). Truthfully, this has a little more in common with The Evil Dead and The Exorcist. If one is capable of putting that kind of nit-picking aside (and an increasingly dumb script), Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is sometimes effective when it’s delivering several inspired, unpredictably nasty gross-outs inside of a demonic possession story.
The film finds a happy family living in Cairo, only to knock them down a peg or two. TV journalist Charlie (Jack Reynor) and pregnant nurse Larissa (Laia Costa) have transplanted their two kids to the Egyptian capital. After their oldest child Katie is tempted with a nectarine by her friend’s magic-powered mother, she disappears without a trace. Eight years later, as the family has moved to Albuquerque, Charlie and Larissa get a call that Katie has been found alive…inside of a 3,000-year-old sarcophagus that survived a plane crash. Although Katie (played by Natalie Grace) clearly doesn’t look or act like herself (and she needs a mani-pedi, stat), the parents decide to take her home, and that’s when the supernatural host occupying Katie’s body begins destroying the entire family.
While not yet a household name or an auteur, Lee Cronin has already cemented himself as a talented genre filmmaker, having debuted with The Hole in the Ground and following up his unsettling, Ireland-made indie with Evil Dead Rises, a gruesomely worthy installment to that franchise. The story should be built on this familial tragedy, but soon, it just seems like Cronin is having fun grossing us out and making us squirm. Unfortunately, there’s little dramatic weight to feel after the promising setup. The pacing grows sluggish, as the film spins its wheels a lot between the Cairo investigation with Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy) and the mummified Katie terrorizing her family in their home.
Cronin does craft several gross-outs that will leave even hardened horror fans wincing or just shocked that a filmmaker was allowed to go to such places. One such highlight is an outrageous set-piece at a family wake, where there’s a Sam Raimi level of twisted, giddy lunacy. He also sets up enough split diopter shots (maybe four too many) to make Brian De Palma climax, but at least visual panache was a priority. On a script level, writer-director Cronin brings together the obvious mystery with one of the laziest movie tropes: having a character find a videotape that explains everything!
Jack Reynor and Laia Costa are as solid as they can be, but their characters seem to only exist in a horror movie. While Charlie and Larissa do convey ample amount of emotion as parents who tragically lose their daughter without more information and get her back almost a decade later, they eventually become numbskulled pawns to the creepy goings-on with their long-lost Katie. It’s hard not to giggle when these two practically drag their daughter up a staircase in her wheelchair, yet they want to give her all of the TLC she needs at home.
Through all of this nonsense, the make-up department and Natalie Grace’s physical performance go a long way toward making sweet Katie now look like a grotesque, long-nailed monster. Veronica Falcón is also very game for everything Katie’s rosary-praying grandmother goes through, as is Billie Roy (as Katie’s younger sister); this movie definitely has it out for little girls and grandmothers.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy knows how to deliver the goods, but it is so needlessly overlong—you start to feel that 134-minute run time—that corpsy Katie begins to wear out her welcome. A lot more gnarly stuff happens in the finale, which grows so hectic and unwieldy, but it’s admittedly entertaining as a goopy, go-for-broke horror show. The ending, however, thinks it’s serving vengeful satisfaction, but it’s tacked-on and egregiously stupid when you stop and give it any thought. Lee Cronin will go on to make more awesomely gross horror movies, but perhaps it’s time to keep the mummies wrapped and buried.
Rating: 2.5/5
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is currently in theaters.
