Michael Fairbanks
Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise was in essence a tour through the series’ greatest stylistic hits. It mimicked Sam Raimi and Fede Álvarez effectively enough to liberate itself from going straight to HBO Max, an impressive feat during the early days of the Warner Discovery era. However, beyond an iconic title card, it never brought anything truly unique to the table. I’m not sure I’d even remember Cronin’s name off the top of my head if he hadn’t plastered it onto the title of his follow up feature Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. This isn’t your daddy or grandaddy’s mummy. No Boris Karloff, Brendan Fraser or Tom Cruise to be found. Cronin has opted to use Egyptian iconography as a canvas for a new series of bombastic gross out gags involving a reanimated little girl who wreaks havoc inside of her family home as her body and mind decay. One might read that and say, “wait, that sounds like another Evil Dead movie.” Nope. This is Lee Cronin’s The Mummy.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy follows the Cannon family as tragedy befalls them during their stay in Cairo. Charlie (Jack Reynor) is a New Mexico based news correspondent who has been stationed there for the time being. His pregnant wife Larissa (Laia Costa) and their two children Katie (Emily Mitchell in this part of the film) and Sebastián (Dean Allen Williams) seem ready to go home. Charlie gets the exciting news that he’ll be able to move his family to New York with a new promotion upon their return but sadly, that doesn’t pan out. Katie is snatched up by a mysterious magician (Hayat Kamille) and Charlie is unable to find her. Devastated, the Cannons return to New Mexico. Eight years later, Cairo based Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy) calls to reveal that they have found Katie (now Natalie Grace) in the wreckage of a plane transporting a sarcophagus. Katie has been decaying inside of it the entire time and is now malnourished and unable to speak. It is quickly clear to Charlie and Larissa that she has become feral and violent but the two decide to do their best to try and re-integrate their beloved daughter back into the family. It does not go well.
There is clear ambition to take The Mummy, which has rather definitively served as B-Movie fodder thus far, and turn it into a critically acclaimed prestige horror. Ari Aster seems like the main influence. We have a two hour plus runtime. Non-stop scenes of a nuclear family unit being devastated. Mysticism hidden in plain sight. Jack Reynor in a lead role. It’s hard not to respect such boldness. There are certainly moments where Lee Cronin’s The Mummy plays to this filmmaker’s strengths to show that he could someday become a force to be reckoned with.
Most of Cronin’s gore ridden set pieces are very effectively executed. He has a sixth sense for placing the camera in the most diabolical proximity to the separation of skin from bone. Katie’s body starts out in rough shape and only gets worse. Cronin makes us viscerally feel and hear every catastrophic setback towards getting her healthy. He’s aided by Natalie Grace’s tremendous physical work. Katie does not speak for the vast majority of the film. She expresses herself through clicks, glares and shocking acts of violence. We’ve seen plenty of creepy kids in horror films but most of them will try to make the kids inherent precociousness part of the shtick. Nothing about Katie is cute. Her very existence is pain.
Sadly, the rest of the cast does not match Natalie Grace’s commitment. Cronin also struggled to give us compelling performances in Rise but those ladies might as well be Shelley Duvall in comparison to Jack Reynor and Laia Costa. These two are unbearably wooden. Reynor is the lesser of the two. Despite Cronin’s insistence that he is deeply rattled and obsessed with figuring out what is wrong with Katie, he rarely seems more than mildly uneasy. He’s simply not that emotive and there are several embarrassing moments where he tries to stretch and it just doesn’t come. He also spends part of the film trying to decode markings on Katie’s severed skin with the help of an archeology professor, but he just never seems smart enough to carry that journalistic mindset. Meanwhile, Costa just gets lost. Larissa is stuck on the “we need to take care of Katie and not acknowledge reality” track for so long that after a while she just seems to lack basic reasoning skills. May Calamawy is more charismatic than Reynor and Costa put together as a detective who spends the vast majority of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy across an ocean from the rest of the action.
There was clearly some consolidation that needed to be done. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy should’ve been set entirely in Cairo and spoken in Arabic. While it is admirable that Cronin pushed for more genuine Egyptian representation, there were clearly studio demands for an American part of the story that belabor the pacing. It is so easy to imagine a streamlined version where Calamawy’s detective is Katie’s mother, allowing her to investigate the kidnapping and her husband to decode the folklore behind it. This could’ve been a genuine rebirth for this property. An opportunity to take it back to its true roots but I suppose that one of Lee Cronin’s stylistic hallmarks is half measures.
When Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is in full funhouse mode, it’s rather enjoyable. Cronin’s fondness for practical effects pays off in spades and he constantly finds ways to play with the camera inside of this relatively limited house. There just aren’t enough distinct elements to his style for him to be a “name above the title” guy just yet. It is certainly a cut above recent checked out Blumhouse fare like Five Nights at Freddy’s or M3gan, though. Perhaps to them, anything above outright mediocrity is worthy of auteur status. Hey, in this difficult industry, you take the wins that you can get.
