By ROBERT DANVERS
Starring Jack Reynor, Laia Costa and Natalie Grace
Written and directed by Lee Cronin
New Line/Warner Bros.
Predicting a future cult film can be a tricky business, or even a fool’s errand, since only time can truly make that determination. Nonetheless, it’s entirely possible that the bonkers overindulgence of LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY will win it the enduring favor of those who enjoy movies that take everything way over the top (including the running time, here protracted to two hours and 13 minutes). In the present, unfortunately, the film suffers from providing way too much of what some viewers would consider a good thing and not enough of others.
One of the disappointments is that this isn’t really a mummy movie in a meaningful way. There’s nothing wrong with a reinvention, but here one set of tropes has simply been exchanged for another, in this case those of the post-EXORCIST demonic-infestation genre. It’s also a letdown coming from Cronin, who did quite well via both the eerie folk horror of A HOLE IN THE GROUND and the in-your-face grue of EVIL DEAD RISE. The, ahem, possessive in the title seems less intended to establish his auteurist authorship than to distinguish this MUMMY from the Brendan Fraser franchise that has another belated chapter on the way.
Not like anyone would confuse this hardcore gore- and ick-fest for one of those four-quadrant adventures. A prologue involving an Egyptian family with a subterranean secret establishes the grotty tone, before giving way to the Cannons, an American family living in Cairo, where dad Charlie (Jack Reynor) is a TV news correspondent. Little daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) gets snatched away from their backyard, and Charlie vainly pursues the abductor through sandstorm-blighted streets in one of the movie’s best setpieces. Eight years later, Charlie, wife Larissa (Laia Costa), their now-teen son Sebastián (Shylo Molina) and a new young daughter, Maud (Billie Roy), are living in Albuquerque when they learn that the long-vanished Katie has been found. She was discovered inside a sarcophagus amidst the wreckage of a plane crash, an accident that Cronin presents in a nicely and spookily off-handed manner.
It’s the last time the writer/director approaches the material with anything approaching subtlety. Katie (now played by Natalie Grace) has emerged from her long imprisonment much the worse for wear, her face deformed, her skin mottled and shriveled, unable to communicate. And yet the hospital quickly releases her into the Cannons’ care without even bothering to groom her, so we can have a lengthy, squirmy scene of Larissa clipping Katie’s gnarly toenails. Pretty soon, expulsions of vomit and other bodily fluids are the order of the day, along with other random yuckiness, so that the movie comes to suggest BEYOND THE DOOR as directed by Lucio Fulci.
And yet, the Cannons continuously act almost comically unfazed by the bizarro behavior they’re confronted with. They find it only momentarily distracting that snarling coyotes start assembling outside the front gate, and you’d think that after they witness Katie scuttling around the house’s crawlspace like an animal and gobbling up a live scorpion at an early point, it would be right back to the hospital with her. But Larissa just unpersuasively insists, “I can fix her.”
If THE MUMMY had really leaned into the psyches of the parents so that this sort of denial was more understandable, it might have delivered more emotional impact. Instead, it spends an inordinate amount of time on investigative subplots that hit all the usual beats. There is an expert who must be consulted about the mythology, or as Charlie puts it, “I’m not interested in your taxes, I’m here to talk about Egyptian hieroglyphics.” There’s an elderly Latina woman, in this case Larissa’s mom Carmen (Veronica Falcón), who knows bad mojo when she sees it. (Since her full name is Carmen Santiago, you keep hoping someone will ask where in the world she is, but no such luck.) Back in Egypt, detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy) digs into the truth behind Katie’s disappearance in sequences that go on at such undue length, they feel like they comprise a whole movie of their own.
The unnecessarily distended storytelling also works against being able to sit back and enjoy THE MUMMY as a camp-overkill experience. As the movie goes on and on, piling on the endless atrocities and grotesqueries coupled with the Cannons’ inability to properly respond to them, the effect becomes numbing rather than exhilarating. Even Katie’s own occult-powered behavior becomes inconsistent; when she winds up tied to a chair, you wonder why she doesn’t just make her straps disappear, considering all the vulgar displays of power she has already indulged in. And while the uncompromising manner in which Cronin subjects every member of the family to grisly abuse is properly shocking for a while, the story ultimately builds to a key child-in-peril scene that’s gratuitously cruel and exceedingly distasteful.
To be fair, there are good moments scattered throughout, including two different ones involving teeth, and the craft and performance behind all the nastiness is certainly praiseworthy. Young actress Grace truly throws herself into the role of Katie, fully conveying her internal and externalized torment, and makeup effects creator Arjen Tuiten unloads a full arsenal of well-realized prosthetics and splatter. This is certainly as graphic and extreme a horror film as has come out of a major studio in some time, but it also demonstrates why most of the best-regarded cinematic blood feasts run only about an hour and a half.
