Del reviews ‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’

Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” Starring Jack Reynor as Charlie Cannon, Laia Costa as Larissa Cannon, May Calamawy as Detective Dalia Zaki, Natalie Grace as Katie, and others. Directed by Lee Cronin. Two hours, 14 minutes. Rated R. Theatrical release.

Spoilers: Mladen took the week off so no, there shouldn’t be any.

Plot summary: An American family living in Egypt suffers a tragedy when their daughter is abducted by persons unknown. Eight years later, the family receives shocking news: Their daughter has been found. They bring her back to their home in the States only to discover she’s no longer the innocent child they knew and loved.

Del’s take:

If you were thinking “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is a re-imagining of the Brendan Fraser Mummy franchise of 1999, allow me to disabuse you of that notion. This is a different story in every way, and I can’t say I enjoyed it more than its romantic and adventurous predecessor.

“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” belongs to a genre I call “gorror,” a portmanteau of “gore” and “horror,” because like many horror movies today it relies on gore, blood and cruelty to generate its tension. I long for the good old days when moviemakers understood the theater of the mind is the best venue for scary tales of the supernatural. Remember films like “The Innocents” or the Robert Wise production of “The Haunting of Hill House,” where the antagonists were rarely (if ever) seen? Those movies were terrifying because they allowed the audience to imagine what might be lurking in the shadows. Ridley Scott gave us only fleeting glimpses of the alien for that very reason.

I could give you a laundry list of shock-value scenes from “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” but I’ll keep it to just this one: At a funeral wake, the body is knocked from its coffin and a young girl laps up embalming fluid oozing from the corpse. Does that scare you, or make you want to vomit? You can share my plastic bag.

It’s a shame because I really wanted to like this movie. The premise was interesting enough: An American family is living in Egypt, where the father works as a journalist. One day their daughter Katie is abducted from their back yard by a mysterious crone. Authorities are unable to recover the girl and the family returns to America heartbroken. Eight years later they receive a call – Katie has been found. But she’s changed. She’s no longer verbal and suffers seizures and other health maladies. The family brings Katie to their home in Arizona where terrible things start to happen, embalming fluid-sipping notwithstanding.

From that point the movie degenerates into a series of scenes intended to revolt and disgust. These scenes are punctuated with moments of explanation – some might call it too much explanation though I’ll never complain about a movie making its intentions clear. At least the script attempts to capture some of the anguish a family would experience under those circumstances and Jack Reynor as the dad, Charlie Cannon, delivers the appropriate pathos, although at times his horror more closely resembles Moe from The Three Stooges finally noticing his hair is on fire. Natalie Grace is appropriately sinister as the altered Katie Cannon. The most memorable character was May Calamawy as Detective Dalia Zaki, who struck me as a kind of Egyptian Clarice Starling. She presented a quiet, sometimes callow dignity and determination that made me want to root for her. Verónica Falcón was also very, very good as Larissa Cannon’s mother, although her role wasn’t very large.

My problem with “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is its cruelty. As an up-and-hopefully-coming horror writer I was always told to never place a child in jeopardy, that audiences wouldn’t like it and editors wouldn’t buy it. Obviously that maxim doesn’t apply to cinema as kids in peril have existed in film for decades, long before “The Exorcist” gave us Linda Blair’s head spinning on a pole back in the early ’70s. But even that can be overdone and “The Mummy” takes its best shot, not just with children but everyone. Two hours of toenails being ripped out and tongues being lopped off, and I was ready for this movie to end.

I’m grading “The Mummy” a B-. I had meant to give it a C+ but I remembered some of my more generous grades for other movies that weren’t as skillfully put together and I reconsidered. “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is a well organized movie and its conceit is clever, but the relentless cruelty and its focus on body horror relegate it to mere gorror status.

I’m much more fearful of what the eye can’t see, but the imagination can. I hope Hollywood rediscovers this simple rubric sooner than later.

Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical writer. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and writer.