Lee Cronin’s THE MUMMY is a disappointment. Writer, director Lee Cronin, fresh off of his mildly received Evil Dead Rise and a promising feature debut with The Hole in the Ground (2019), is handed the reigns to a classic monster. Cronin could have gone anywhere with the property and chose again to tell a tale of disconnected family. Again. Here we meet Charlie (Jack Reynor), an American television correspondent living in Egypt with his wife Larissa (Laia Costa) and children Katie (Emily Mitchell) and Sebastian (Dean Allen Williams). Tragedy strikes and Katie is abducted. Charlie and Larissa logically ask the police for help and the young and eager Detective Dahlia Zaki (May Calamawy) is handed the case. Sadly everything goes cold.
We jump to eight years later. Charlie, Larissa, and their son have moved back to Albuquerque, New Mexico to live with Larissa’s mother Carmen (Veronica Falcón) in her sprawling home. Charlie and Larissa have a new daughter, Maude (Billie Roy), and life seems to be getting back to “normal”. Still, the mourning couple can’t fully move on. They insist that a room be kept, fully furnished, awaiting Katie’s return home. Weird. Then they get the call. Katie (Natalie Grace) has been found back in Egypt where she was abducted. She is in a near catatonic state and doctors can only marvel at her strange condition. The embattled couple gets Katie back home and they try to integrate her into the new normal.
Weird things begin to happen. The family was warned that Katie might have sudden outbursts. But they were never warned about her habit of eating live scorpions living in the spacious crawlspaces of the house. Nor were Charlie and Larissa given any notice that Katie might vomit gallons of caustic fluid or that she might start to possess other family members. It was here that I realized we were being served up a strange hybrid of horror tropes. Zombies, possession, curses, all mashed together in a bland horror casserole.
Meanwhile, back in Cairo, Detective Dahlia is still chipping away at who the kidnapper might be and why they did it. Cronin’s storytelling relies more on keeping the audience confused as opposed to slowly revealing details. When that doesn’t work he moves to “when in doubt, gross ’em out!” It’s a shame too because all the gallons of goop and close-ups of practical effects land with a thud because we simply don’t care about what’s happening. We were never given a reason to.
The film looks like a million bucks. It should. With a reported budget of 22 million, we get Oscar Nominee Nick Bassett’s Production Design, Robert Barrett’s Art direction, and David Garbett’s colorful photography. I even enjoyed Stephen McKeon’s disorienting score that played mercilessly with discordant sounds and odd fluctuations to keep us of balance.
I argue that Cronin is a good filmmaker. It’s clear that Cronin is fascinated by that devastating sense of loss and betrayal that comes from intimate loss. But his preferred territory just doesn’t work.
Oh well. I’ll wrap up this review of Lee Cronin’s THE MUMMY by offering this cold comfort. If this one doesn’t exactly hit, we can be sure that Universal will try to reboot The Mummy again at some point. Additionally we have Brendan Fraser coming back to take a stab at it on May 19, 2028.
