Full disclosure: my critical sensibilities are severely dulled by gnarly gore effects and inventive methods by which characters meet their untimely ends, so while Lee Cronin’s The Mummy has its fair share of story issues, which I will get into, it also has some of the best and most imaginative carnage since, well, Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, and as such, I’m a bit over the moon for an entertaining, brutal film that isn’t quite as good or original as I wanted it to be.
Note: Evil Dead Rise gave birth to one of my patented Letterboxd lists, which can be viewed here.
With that out of the way, I can tell you right out of the gate that many aspects of The Mummy reach legitimate BANGER status. So much so, that I was somewhat less bothered by the sea of cretins who kept illuminating their phones throughout the movie instead of staying home and holding their breath until they pass out and miss the movie entirely.
Clocking in at 2 hours and 13 minutes, Cronin’s film grows considerably unwieldy in its final act. There are multiple dangled threads that either don’t pay off or don’t inspire the urgency that they would in a normal world where people behave with some sort of logic. More than a few times I had the thought of Where did ::character:: go?
One gets the sense that any plot line not currently on screen is paused while off screen.
At one point I had the very specific thought of Are we really going to ignore the patch of magic goop that appeared on the floor?
The goop pays off later, to be sure, but at no point does anyone say “hey, we really need to talk about the magic goop.” Heck, when my cat creates normal, run-of-the-mill goops on my floor, I never shut up about it, AND I LIVE ALONE (with cat, who does not speak English).
The good news is that up until the film’s final, predictable, chaotic act, Cronin has constructed a dense, thoroughly entertaining riff on mummy mythology. The balancing act of so many adjacent plot threads is maintained with style, but the lack of care toward its sheer volume means that the crash is almost inevitable. You just can’t keep that many plates spinning without something giving way, but if a shard from one of said plates pierces someone’s jugular, spraying blood and, yes, goop in all directions, welp, I’m all about it.
The titular mummy in this case is not a rotting corpse from ancient Egypt, but rather a modern 16-year-old girl, who was kidnapped 8 years prior. She, her brother, and her parents (Jack Raynor and Laia Costa) had been living in Egypt at the time, but in the years since her disappearance, the family has moved back to the states. They receive a call out of the blue: Katie has been found, and she’s in very bad shape. She’s catatonic, heavily wounded, and unable to provide any information about how she ended up wrapped in bandages in a sarcophagus. For some strange reason she is released to the family and not a hospital, but whatever. Soon after she arrives home, shit starts getting Regan MacNeil-ish, and the family is stuck wondering just what happened to the girl they once knew.
One half of the film is a monster movie — one much more tonally in tune with exorcism films (or Evil Dead Rise) — while the other half is a mystery procedural in which Katie’s father, assisted by a detective (May Calamawy), work to figure out where Katie has been, and why she is the way she is. As proven by Evil Dead Rise, Cronin knows his way around a scare scene (and a goop gag), and has a strong command of pacing. Even as the film falls off the rails, it never slows down, but neither does it feel like it’s rushing toward the credits. Despite the large runtime, there isn’t much I’d cut from it. I found it engaging from beginning to end, even though it goes nowhere particularly surprising.
Perhaps the film’s greatest strength is the fact that it looks like movie. Unlike the most recent mainstream mummy film, in which Tom Cruise does stunts, Cronin’s film has a distinct visual style and crisp cinematography. Short of one bland CGI dust storm (in which the titular mummy’s face does NOT appear, breaking a nearly 30 year trend), everything feels tactile, and is shot/lit with intention. I’d probably argue that there are a few too many split diopter shots, but I’d rather an excess of well-employed in-camera panache than a bunch of soulless pre-vizzed slop. This is a horror film that kinda sorta has a mummy in it, not an adventure film that has many mummies in it. As much as I would’ve liked to see a new take on THE mummy, I’m pleased as punch to see a new take on A mummy, even if it really is just Egypt Dead Rise.
Which brings me to my closing point: much has been said about the titling convention of the film. Namely, that Lee Cronin is not enough of a name to merit this possessory title. I would argue that this is simply a logistical decision, made to differentiate the project from many other films simply called The Mummy. Now that I’ve seen the film and am thus able to track the similarities between it and Cronin’s prior work, it can be argued that the filmmaker has a very distinct style, enough to merit mentioning his name. Whether or not that style is to your tastes is up to you to decide, but I’m a fan, and I’ll happily plop my ass down in a seat for Lee Cronin’s Whatever in the future.
Hopefully Whatever can apply Cronin’s goopy, aggro style to something that isn’t just a surface level rebrand of his prior films.
Bonus: Best toenail gag maybe ever. You think you know what it is, but I promise you that you don’t.
Directed by Lee Cronin
Written by Lee Cronin
Starring Jack Raynor, Laia Costa,Veronica Falcón, Natalie Grace
Rated R, 133 minutes
