Out of all the Universal Classic Monsters, of which there have been many movies about them from the thirties till the fifties, the Mummy is arguably one of the least interesting monsters, despite being played by legends like Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney Jr. And yet, from 1999, we have seen radical spins on the mummified figure, starting with Stephen Sommers’ action-adventure series to the 2017 Tom Cruise-starred blockbuster that spectacularly failed to start the Dark Universe.
While we await a fourth installment of the Sommers series with Brendan Fraser reprising his iconic role of Rick O’Connell, Lee Cronin has his own take on how to bring back the horror for this particular monster (for Warner Bros, not Universal). Having only written and directed three films, Cronin loves to tell horror stories about the internal and external terror that plagues, from his original debut feature The Hole in the Ground to the successful franchise relaunch Evil Dead Rise. In the case of The Mummy, it centers on the broken family, the Cannons, who must come to terms with the sudden return of the eldest daughter who disappeared into the Cairo desert eight years ago.
What immediately sets this apart from previous versions is the Mummy itself, steering away from the likes of Arnold Vosloo’s hunky Imhotep and even Sofia Boutella’s athletic Ahmanet, you have newcomer Natalie Grace, who truly commits in the role of Katie, who has been stripped away of any gentle innocence and replaced with gnarly prosthetic work that really delivers the body horror. However, from the many scenes where she creepily scuttles her way through the family household, whilst saying plenty of profane words, the more obvious it became where Cronin’s horror influences for this film were coming from.
From The Exorcist to Hereditary to even Cronin’s own Evil Dead, The Mummy throws a lot at the audience such as the gooey violence, domestic family troubles and a whole subplot involving May Calamawy as a detective who investigates Katie’s reappearance. The tone can go through from seriousness as seen through the family learning to process many things from grief to regret, to goofiness where the heightened horror starts to overstay its welcome. Despite Cronin putting his personal stamp that was inspired by his own family tragedy, as well as owing a debt to William Friedkin’s 1973 masterpiece, the film starts to feel more like an Exorcist sequel where the special effects-driven climax gets blown out of proportions.
The central family delivers strong performances, especially Jack Reynor and Laia Costa who capture that sense of desperation of losing a child but also trying to understand what really happened. Sadly, Cronin’s writing falls into horror cliches which leads to characters making stupid decisions like how they should their troubling daughter, or the most awkward timing for a funeral, which leads to the film’s most unintentionally funny sequence. By the time we are introduced to the archeology scholar who has the thankless role of explaining the backstory that somehow gets explained again, The Mummy is all about tropes with no real attempt to innovate them.
