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A lot of jokes have been made at the director’s expense because of it, but if Lee Cronin’s “The Mummy” hadn’t been released as “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” it would be extremely difficult to tell who made it. Maybe the wet gore would give it away? The word “slop” doesn’t come to mind for once (bland as it is, Cronin’s film is far too effortful for that), but goop is its only defining touch.
A taste for black vomit, loose embalming fluid, and various other such viscous liquids is the closest thing the “Evil Dead Rise” director has to a visual signature of his own. Anyone eager to watch a possessed child peel semi-congealed strips of rotten flesh off their leg could certainly do worse at the multiplex this weekend (“You, Me & Tuscany” falls woefully short in that department). But this dull and labored attempt at reviving one of the movies’ oldest monsters is too derivative where it counts. Its characters are thin, its setpieces and sick delights are nakedly borrowed from much better films, and its titular evil has never been less threatening. I don’t have any particular brand loyalty to the ancient likes of Imhotep and Ahmanet (remember her?), but, to his credit, Lee Cronin has inspired my first strong opinion about the mummy: It shouldn’t be an eight-year-old girl named Katie.
Updating its BC baddie for the everything-is-trauma flavor of the post-horror age, this take on the mummy does everything in its power to suck the fun out of its narrative tradition (a strategy that it eventually seeks to roll back, with some measure of success, during a Raimi-esque third act). Forget tomb-raiding matinee idols stumbling upon a buried curse, “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” starts with an adorable child being abducted from the Cairo apartment that TV news reporter Charlie Cannon — played by a peevish Jack Reynor — has been renting for his family while stationed in Egypt. We see that little Katie (Emily Mitchell) has been stolen by an evil magician (Hayat Kamille), but Charlie and his wife Larissa (Laia Costa) are left in the dark.
When the story picks up eight years later, the still-grieving Cannon family has resettled in an isolated house on the outskirts of Albuquerque — a house that appears to have been designed by the same architect who built the home in “Hereditary,” complete with all the gabled ceilings a movie demon would ever want to scuttle across in the background of a wide shot. A room has been left for Katie in the hopes that she might return one day, but the Cannons have another eight-year-old daughter now (Billie Roy as Maud), their son Sebastián (Shylo Molina) has grown into a moody teenager, and Larissa’s flamboyant mother Carmen (Verónica Falcón) has moved in with them for good measure. While an ocean of pain roils under the surface, of course, life continues apace.
Until, that is, Charlie receives a call from the dogged Cairo detective who’s still determined to solve his daughter’s case (Egyptian-Palestinian actress May Calamawy as Dalia Zaki). She spends most of the movie siloed into a supernatural crime drama that happily pulls focus away from the main action in New Mexico. Katie has quite literally dropped out of the sky, Detective Zaki reports, and she’s ready to come home. Don’t worry about the fact that she was found inside a 3,000-year-old sarcophagus, or that her body has atrophied from malnourishment to the point that her papyrus skin is rotting off the bone and she can only communicate in a wheezy death rattle — I’m sure a hot meal and a few long hugs will have the girl back to her old self in no time. “I can fix her,” Larissa declares.
You will not be shocked to discover that she can’t. There’s something to be said about the Cannon family’s refusal to reckon with the profound horror that has been inflicted upon them, but it would be an understatement to say that “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” insufficiently invests in their denialism. Despite repeated overtures toward deeper feeling, and the rich vein of emotion that a better film might have tapped from the pain of forcing Katie’s parents to question the only answer they’ve ever gotten to their most desperate prayers, this dour clump of feel-bad “fun” lacks the courage to look at what’s under the skin — even as it shoves our faces in a sticky mess of bone and bile.
It might be paced like a drama, but “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is only interested in its characters for the cruelties that it can inflict upon them, and it falls well short of the twisted imagination required for us to delight in their suffering. That failure starts with its evil namesake (by which I mean the mummy, not Lee Cronin), who has to look “normal” enough for the Cannons to credibly believe that their little girl is still hiding somewhere under all of that uninspired makeup.
‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett CollectionEmbodied — with great conviction — by Natalie Grace now that she’s a few years older, Katie is more Linda Blair than Boris Karloff, and everything she does screams “horror movie 101” even before she begins talking in leftover dialogue from “The Exorcist” (demons have had thousands of years to come up with fun new ways of torturing us, and yet they still can’t think of anything more clever than making little girls call their parents and teachers “cunts”). Killing birds, scampering around the crawl space at night, making the local coyotes snarl at Charlie’s SUV… everything Katie does has to be deniable enough for her parents to roll with it, a story choice that defangs Cronin’s ability to let loose. The jolts are muted, the setpieces are drab, and the gore is all too literally kept under wraps.
The mummy delights in slowly unraveling her new host family (this is as close as the movie gets to a big idea), but not all of us are blessed with the patience of an undying Egyptian deity. Its jaundiced southwestern color palette dovetailing with the ugliness of its story (in addition to rhyming with the more evocative “Middle Eastern” locales, actually Spain, that it cuts back to throughout the first two acts), “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” grows a bit more assured of its purpose once its namesake — by which I mean Lee Cronin, not the mummy — gives himself permission to cut loose. Like when a wake becomes the backdrop for a morbidly amusing sequence inspired by the director’s own experience. Later, the spectacle of Katie hovering in her wheelchair is so much weaker than any of the sickness Cronin squeezed out of “Evil Dead Rise.” This new film’s climactic assault of extracted teeth and projectile vomit at least suggests the potential he saw in a project that has precious little interest in the mummy itself.
There’s an offhanded line about how Egypt’s sacred history is used to smuggle all manner of modern sins, but the only history “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” cares about is family history, and even that only tends to get in the way. Leaving aside how needlessly conspicuous it is for the film’s “villain” to kidnap a somewhat high-profile American child, the backstory Cronin provides for her — and her lineage — is at total odds with the tone of her ultimate fate, which inexplicably pushes this mean and somber tale about the poisoned strength of familial bonds into rah-rah revenge territory. The final scene doesn’t just make for a clunker of an ending; it also completely undermines the movie’s supposed commitment to anything beyond the most basic thrills. It doesn’t even feel like it belongs to “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” as we’ve come to know it, which is par for the course in the context of a horror film that’s only distinguished by its lack of a prevailing identity.
Grade: C-
Warner Bros. Pictures will release “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” in theaters on Friday, April 17.
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