Who? From the word go, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy sets off on the wrong foot with a fairly self-aggrandising title.
I can understand the thought process behind the choice – this new take on the classic Universal Monsters’ Mummy wants to make a clear distinction between itself and the much-loved Egyptian escapades of Brendan Fraser – but given that this is only Cronin’s third feature film, it does feel rather unearned. His second outing put him on the map, helming 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, which fans of the franchise seemed to enjoy, but despite hearing a fair deal about that film, I’d never heard the director’s name. Thus, I saw the title here and drew a complete blank. Including your name in the title of your movie always feels a little weighty – as though you’re throwing down the gauntlet to say ‘Yup, you’re about to see something with a bit of prestige behind it’ – but at least when Wes Craven (for New Nightmare) or Del Toro (for Pinocchio) pulled the same trick, there was a sense of brand recognition. Here, it just feels like a somewhat embarrassing case of jumping the gun from a director eager to become an auteur of the horror genre.
‘That thing they put inside her was meant to stay buried and bound’
Those of you who do go along to catch Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (yes, I’m going to keep saying it) in the cinema may find yourselves rather let down, especially if you’re looking for something properly scary. I don’t quite know the tone that the film’s trying to achieve or the register that it wants to hit (and I’m not sure Lee Cronin does either) but the trailer would have you believe that this is a properly tense horror story with all the drama and scares of the classic ‘possessed young child’ archetype.
It’s well-trod ground for horror – a trope that was a staple of the genre even before Linda Blair played a foul-mouthed, regurgitating Regan in The Exorcist – but in the right hands, it can still be compelling stuff. One such example of this very thing done right would be last year’s Bring Her Back, which I finally saw just the night before this film.
With another possessed child, more creepy ritualistic VHS tapes and vomit-based transformations, the two nearly work as a double bill – one I’d leave halfway through before Lee Cronin’s title card could appear on-screen. Bring Her Back wasn’t an all-time classic, just a very strong horror movie, but compared to this Mummy movie, it might as well have been Citizen Kane. Sorry…Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.
We follow Charlie and Larissa, two parents who we first meet living in Cairo with their eight-year-old daughter Katie and her older brother. Your typical adorably trusting young girl, Katie soon finds herself spirited away by a mysterious stranger who appears at her garden fence, leaving the family broken.
Eight years later, we rejoin the family, now living in equally sandy New Mexico, forever changed by Katie’s disappearance. Before long, however, through a fair shake of plot contrivance, Katie reappears in Cairo in strange and unsettling circumstances, returning to her bewildered family as a shaky, warped shell of her past self.
The doctors, as they do, seem to find nothing wrong with her, though, instead suggesting they just give Katie some time and TLC, and the family are left to deal with the consequences of her finally coming home…if they can.
It’s ludicrous stuff, and you can feel the plot shifting elements and characters around to try and get it all to sing in the right key for the story to get to where it needs to be, but that’d be somewhat excusable if the story was worth following. It really isn’t.
There are occasional moments where you sympathise with Charlie, for instance, and glean something akin to an idea of the loss he and his family have endured for the past eight years and the strangeness of having Katie back in their lives after assuming the worst, but they never manage to make themselves heard over the unholy din of everything else in the film.
I might not have heard of Lee Cronin before going into this, but I felt like he and I became very familiar with each other over the course of the next 130 minutes. He’s very big on in-your-face action and scares, which can absolutely work in a horror film, but I think the core issue at play in his Mummy flick is a complete lack of tact.
Somebody jumping out and saying ‘Boo’ can be scary at first, but if that same person did it again and again and again, you’d probably just find yourself a bit miffed by the whole thing. The same is true of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. It’s important not to make fast judgements, especially when you find yourself right at the start of a film with two whole hours yet to go, but when the supposedly visceral and shocking opening jump-scare didn’t catch me off-guard in the slightest (I literally counted down to it in my head, 1…2…3…and-) I felt certain that the rest of the film would be a slog. I don’t like to be proven right – I love it when films manage to turn things around and have me on-side by the end – but I was right on this occasion.
I don’t want to spoil anything, because I know there are horror fans who do genuinely get a kick out of this sort of thing, so I’ll just say that Cronin throws just about everything at the camera in the hopes of something sticking. All the things you might expect are present and accounted for, and if anything comes to close to being surprising, it’s really just a case of wondering why someone would go about including that in their film in that way.
It’s so easy to just let things run wild with horror and completely overdo it, and that’s exactly what’s happened here, to the point where the film just feels rather infantile and misjudged, lacking any sense of restraint at any and all turns. I feel there’s something incredibly measured about even the goriest and most shocking horror classics – the ones that know just how far to push the boat without losing you – but I never felt scared at any point of this; just wholly put-off by the silliness of it.
Crucially, I’m aware that Cronin’s previous film was part of The Evil Dead, a franchise that has made a name for itself in threading the needle between the scary and the stupid in the best way – the kind that has you unsure of whether to laugh or scream. One might think that Lee Cronin’s The Mummy would work on a similar level, but it’s quite spectacular just how dour and unenjoyable a ride it turns out to be.
If he was going for comedy, it’s not funny (there were no laughs at all in the screening I went along to); if the film’s trying to be an out-and-out horror as advertised, it’s not scary. The two conflicting tones just cancel each other out completely. At times, you’ll get a horrific sequence that’s immediately followed by some kind of poppy, upbeat needle drop, obviously aiming for a bit of contrast, but they just feel terribly out of place. Cronin never quite goes as far as dusting off The Bangles for another outing – for a film called The Mummy, its Egyptian elements are actually few and far between – but I wouldn’t have been surprised if he did.
Ultimately, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy proved to be a long and difficult slog to get through, especially given the massively bloated runtime. There are vague attempts at carrying a bit of the lifeblood of Evil Dead, Cronin clearly wanting to find his own niche in that particular ballpark, but without the same input of Raimi and Campbell (with whom he worked closely on Rise), he’s unable to stand on his own two feet as the director at the helm of this project.
I love a bit of Egyptian mythology – though it’s cliche, I got a kick out of the scene in which the characters consult a wise old professor who has just the right book to give some quick exposition – but as many have said (quite rightly), this doesn’t feel like a Mummy movie. It’s an Exorcist movie in all but name and as it turns out, Lee Cronin’s The Exorcist doesn’t have the discipline or conviction to come anywhere near success.
BBFC: Rated 18 for strong gore, violence, horror.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is in cinemas now.
