It is only fair to give Lee Cronin points for wanting to expand the horizons of what a horror film about a mummy can be, but in LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY, that is pretty much the where originality ends. This overlong and gore-drenched exercise has a slap-dash quality to its writing coupled with putatively intelligent characters who spend their time between bouts of bloodletting making the absolutely dumbest decisions possible. That is, until the consequences of their missing the obvious at every turn finally registers when it is, of course, too late to do anything but battle evil to the death.
We start, of course, in Egypt, where we meet The Magician (Hayat Kamille), a woman with three kids and a husband who get on her nerves with their joie de vivre. She’s a killjoy, literally, as we learn in the first few minutes, but then again, she is hiding something very bad in the basement of her home in the middle of the desert. And that something is in an even crabbier mood than she is.
Jump to the happy home of Charlie and Larissa Cannon (Jack Reynor and Laia Costa), the delighted parents of pre-teens Katie and Sebastian with another on the way who will be named Maud. She’s a nurse, and he’s a television correspondent on the verge of breaking through to the big time in New York City. All is sunshine and smiles and semi-serious arguments about what constitutes a pizza after five months in Cairo. But just as Charlie’s dreams are coming true, Katie is kidnapped from her backyard, and the local police (Husam Chadat and May Calamawy) are convinced that Charlie had something to do with it.
Jump again, this time eight years and across the globe to Albuquerque, NM, and into the spacious home of Larissa’s mother (Veronica Falcón), a retired hairdresser who never tires of recounting how she once dressed the hair of Sophia Loren. They live there because Charlie’s big break never happened. Larissa keeps a shrine-like room ready for Katie just in case, and the kids are not too traumatized by the psychic shock that hovers over the family. Until a miracle happens. Katie (Natalie Grace) is found under unlikely circumstances and returned to the Cannon’s malnourished, catatonic, and suffering a skin condition that points to having not seen the sun in the eight years she’s been missing.
Horror fans, we all know what’s coming, and with the constant use of an overwrought soundtrack and portentous direction, every gory beat to come is telegraphed with an impunity that irksomely nullifies any suspense. The narrative lopes along covering all the standard tropes, including convenient recordings that reveal the malevolence at hand, a convenient (and British, what else?) college professor (Mark Mitchinson) who can read the pre-hieroglyphic writing that keeps unwinding from Katie, and a convenient warren of crawlspaces in the family home that affords Katie the opportunity to scuttle along at a brisk clip in search of vermin on which to snack. Oh, and a pack of coyotes malingering at the front gates waiting for their chance to chomp on the entrails of someone who is not quite dead yet.
It is a crime that some fine thespians are involved, and they are commended for giving their all, particularly Grace, who spends the film encased in monster makeup that allows little facial expression, but can still conjure up uncanny valley with clacking teeth and clattering choreography. Alas, she, like the rest of the cast are secondary to the eruptions of flesh, blood, and various vile excrescences that are painfully derivative and have less terror-inducing impact than the results of bad housekeeping or lack of a good pedicure.
A case can be made that the subtext of LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY is to explore the very real horror of every parent’s worst nightmare. Very bad things do happen to Katie, and both Sebastian and Maud suffer from the fallout of that, but ascribing noble intent does nothing to enhance the enjoyment of a film that falls so very flat. The best thing here are a pair of mourners at a funeral who talk smack about the deceased with brittle refinement and palpable glee. If there’s a sequel, and I fear there will be, make them the central characters, and the mummy’s antics the subplot.
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