Lee Cronin’s ‘The Mummy’ Review — A Deadite in Bandages That Lingers Too Long
Lee Cronin’s reimagining of The Mummy is a curious cinematic terror. Coming off the claustrophobic, eviscerating success of Evil Dead Rise, Cronin was an inspired choice to resurrect Universal’s second most identifiable undead sovereign. However, the final product is a film caught in a tug-of-war between high-octane horror and bloated pacing. It delivers on style and discomforting scares, but falters significantly when it comes to basic common sense and the endurance of its audience.
Boiled down, the plot revolves around a young girl (Natalia Grace) turning up eight years after being kidnapped by a weird lady magician (Hayat Kamille) who earns the girl’s trust with exotic chocolate bars. The victim of a bizarre demonic ritual, she is somehow alive despite being mummified, and when her distraught family takes her home without hesitation, their household becomes the playground for an ancient entity’s curse.
You get the picture. It’s all too familiar. You can’t watch this film without seeing the Evil Dead franchise’s blood-smeared fingerprints all over the sand. Cronin treats his mummy less like a tragic figure of antiquity and more like a relentless, mocking presence. The camera puts the viewer right into the thick of the action with extreme close-ups of every twitch, tooth chattering, and tearing of flesh to a most uncomfortable degree. However, the gore is surprisingly moist for a tentpole, preferring practical effects and “squelch” over sanitized CGI (for the most part).
For any fans of Cronin’s previous work, this “Evil Dead-ification” provides a much-needed edge to the franchise, even if the relentless mean-spiritedness of the horror occasionally clashes with the film’s grander ambitions that undergird its archaeological subplot and family drama.
Where it truly struggles, though, is in the due diligence department regarding its characters and their reactions to the escalating weirdness. The narrative hinges on a family’s grief and slow descent into madness after their daughter is revealed as the vessel for an ancient curse. While a certain level of denial is expected, the girl’s mother (Laia Costa) strains credulity to its thinnest. Her insistence on bringing her clearly possessed “baby girl” back to their suburban home — despite the child speaking in dead tongues and manifesting physical abnormalities — is beyond absurd.
Medical professionals aren’t much better, or saner for that matter, as they offer sterile and useless diagnoses while the girl stares unblinkingly at everything like a predatory lizard. On a scale of 1 to 10 for survival instincts, this family and their doctors earn a solid 6 or 7. And unfortunately, I’m referring to their collective IQ, not their score. It’s the kind of stupidity that pulls your mind out of the tension; you find yourself less worried about their safety and more annoyed that they didn’t call an exorcist (or at least a mover) an hour earlier.
Speaking of which… clocking in at over two hours and ten minutes, Cronin’s Mummy has a severe pacing problem. While the first half is good at laying the groundwork, with moments of solid dread, the film spirals into a redundant cycle of “haunting, arguing, and exposition.” Cronin might have been hesitant to cut anything, but he should have. There are too many unpleasant moments involving children and corpses I would’ve liked him to trim.
He could have kept the seedier elements under control and perhaps prevented the whole affair from losing momentum long before the climax. At 90 or 100 minutes, this could’ve been a chilling sprint; at over two hours, it feels more like a slow, dusty crawl through the Sahara.
Despite all that, I can give this film props for one thing: its sound quality. If you have the chance to see this in a high-end theater with Dolby Atmos, it might be worth your while. Cronin and his crew did an impressive job layering a soundscape that is crisp and startling when it needs to be. The gory effects, the chomping, and other movements the resurrected girl makes — particularly in the extreme, disquieting closeups — are at least enhanced to an aptly disturbing level.
In short, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is loud, menacing, and a pretty frustrating exercise in style over substance. It’s a fun ride if you can ignore everybody’s lack of brain cells, but you might find yourself checking your watch a lot up until the sarcophagus finally closes.
Lee Cronin's The Mummy
PROS
- Sound
- Cinematography
- Convincing gore effects
CONS
- Acting, especially Jack Reynor who sleepwalks through most of the film
- Running time
- Character logic
- Dialogue riddled with bizarre and inappropriate innuendos uttered by underage children (they are possessed, but still)
