“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” a lame knockoff of better possession thrillers

Prior to what I will generously call his “new take” on “The Mummy,” director Lee Cronin was best known for 2023’s “Evil Dead Rise.” Original “Evil Dead” director Sam Raimi had a new movie out earlier this year with “Send Help,” and he didn’t put his name in that film’s title. And his name carries real weight, he directed the Tobey Maguire “Spider-Man” trilogy back in the 2000’s. But the guy who directed the fifth “Evil Dead” movie thinks his name belongs in the very title of his next project. At least this way I know who to blame for this movie, so points for “owning it,” I guess. The film follows the Cannon family: father Charlie (Jack Reynor), mother Larissa (Laia Costa), son Sebastian (initially Dean Allen Williams, later Shylo Molina), and daughter Katie (initially Emily Mitchell, later Natalie Grace). They’re an American family living in Cairo next door to a mean matriarch known as The Magician (Hayat Kamille), who we know from the film’s prologue is the protector and caregiver of a malevolent Egyptian entity. Katie goes missing, and the local police, including young detective Dalia (May Calamawy) are no help. Eight years pass. The family is still devastated by the loss of Katie, but they’ve had another daughter named Maud (Billie Roy). One day, thanks to a deadly plane crash, they get an unexpected call from Cairo that Katie has been found alive… though very corpse-like. She was found wrapped in bandages inside an ancient sarcophagus found in the wreckage, in very poor health thanks to malnutrition and other forms of negligence, but alive. The parents want to know what happened to Katie in those eight years, and they’ll look to Dalia for those answers, but the important thing at the moment is that they have their daughter back. The family takes Katie home from what has to be the most incompetent hospital in the world to release a patient in her condition. And as you can probably guess, it doesn’t take long for things to start going wrong at home. Katie can supposedly barely move, but she keeps jumping out of her bed and scuttling around the house, eating scorpions, and hurting anyone in her vicinity, especially her religious grandmother (Verónica Falcón). Oh, and she spits up blood a lot. This is a movie that never passes up an opportunity to have its characters spit up any number of fluids. That’s where most of the “style” and scares lie for this movie – gross-outs and gore. Initially some of it is mildly shocking, but Cronin’s overreliance on these elements makes them downright boring by the end. And there’s plenty of time to become bored because this movie is way too long at 134 minutes. Cronin just had to keep Dalia, the Magician, and Cairo in the movie, even though dropping them and rewriting the script to keep things within the family probably could have saved the production millions of dollars, and more importantly, about 44 minutes of my time. “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” i mostly “The Exorcist” and “Evil Dead.” This movie has more in common with those movies than any “Mummy” movie I know. In fact, my theory is that Cronin wrote this script as a follow-up to his “Evil Dead” movie, and when he got this job, he just removed all references to Deadites and added a sarcophagus and some bandages. If that is the case, then the “Evil Dead” franchise dodged a bullet not having this uncreative dreck as an installment. Grade: D“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is rated R for strong disturbing violent content, gore, language, and brief drug use. Its running time is 134 minutes.Read More