‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ Review: Scary as Hell, Except for the Mummy Parts

The first thing you’ll notice about “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is that it’s called “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” — officially, as part of the title — which is such a distraction that we should probably just talk about it now. The honorific legally distinguishes Warner Bros.’ new mummy movie from the iconic, lucrative and nearly century-old Universal Horror franchise of the same name. Because mummies really do exist, they’re officially fair game; but brand confusion is also real, so if you’re going to make a mummy movie at another studio, it had better be its own thing. And you’d better be very, very clear about that.

After all the weird insistence that this is definitely a mummy movie, but not that mummy movie, it’s odd to discover that “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is barely a mummy movie. Yes, there’s a mummy in it, and yes, the film is full of supernatural horrors, but writer/director Cronin treats the mummy parts like window dressing. Cronin’s latest is uncannily similar to his last movie, “Evil Dead Rise.” Both are about families ripped apart — literally and figuratively — after a loved one gets possessed by a demon. And both films are gross as hell. And although both films play exactly like “Evil Dead” movies. It just so happens that “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” officially, is not.

Charlie (Jack Reynor) and Larissa (Laia Costa) are Americans working in Cairo. He’s a journalist, she works in medicine, and they’re so busy they don’t notice their daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) has made a creepy new friend. When Katie is kidnapped, she disappears for eight whole years, finally turning up in the darnedest of places: in an ancient sarcophagus, at the site of a mysterious plane crash.

Charlie and Larissa take Katie, now played by Natalie Grace, home to Albuquerque. She’s almost catatonically traumatized, uncontrollably violent, and still healing from massive physical injuries. It’s understandable that they want Katie back in their lives but letting a family with no experience provide this kind of 24-hour care, without any additional assistance, or even just keeping Katie hospitalized for a while to be on the safe side, feels like a malpractice suit waiting to happen. Especially when Katie’s flesh peels off in long, bacon-like chunks and she vomits bile that eats through the floorboards, while psychically turning the whole family against each other.

Murder and mayhem are coming, but Cronin takes his time getting to the old ultraviolence. The middle of this film tries to build momentum, and it mostly does. We sympathize with Charlie, Larissa and the rest of their family — their youngest daughter Maud (Billie Roy), their son Sebastián (Shylo Molina) and Larissa’s mother Carmen (Verónica Falcón) — whenever they try to overlook the obvious, horrifying red flags and act like everything could be normal. But it does strain credulity after a while. Charlie finally insists on investigating Katie’s disappearance so they can figure out what’s wrong with her, which Cronin tries to portray as a character flaw. But it’s not. It’s just a thing reasonable people would do.

Cronin has the emotional heart of his film down pat, but he can’t get a handle on his plot. That’s not a problem when your film is “Evil Dead Rise” and the plot is “demon book makes people demons,” but this is a plot-heavy mystery with tons of exposition, and a lengthy side quest about an Egyptian detective, Dalia (May Calamawy), tracking down Katie’s kidnappers. The more we find out, the less it makes any logical sense, even for the film’s villains. When we finally learn why they kidnapped Katie, it’s clear there was no reason to specifically abduct her. If anything, abducting an American citizen drew unwanted attention to their plan, so she was pretty much the last kid they ever should have kidnapped. The mummy part of this mummy movie really does hold it back.

But again, Lee Cronin doesn’t seem interested in the mummy stuff anyway. He wants to tell a tragic tale about a family already on the brink, torn asunder all over again by taking in a traumatized child who needs constant, exhausting care and is a danger to themselves and others. That’s a dark storyline, suitable for the horror genre, and it hits hard, but it doesn’t come to a satisfying conclusion. “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” gets resolved through supernatural shenanigans and plot conveniences, not the personal growth that would sell its most powerful themes. And the tacked-on ending, which comes out of nowhere and plays like a last-minute studio note, only makes the story seem more haphazard.

But the bottom line is: “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is, first and foremost, a scary movie — and it’s scary, scary, scary. Cronin has an uncanny knack for human mutilation, which would probably be a bad thing in any other context, but if you’re making gross-out horror movies, it’s practically a requirement. He sets up his story, he introduces multifaceted characters, casts emotionally open actors and then sets about obliterating their minds, bodies and souls.

This movie makes you wince every couple of minutes. That’s enough to recommend a horror movie. It’s just not enough to make it a great one, with or without the mummies, nor is it enough to make you stop wondering whether Lee Cronin’s The Mummy would win in a fight against Lee Daniel’s The Butler. (The safe money is on The Mummy, but don’t sleep on The Butler. If he could survive the Nixon administration, he could also survive this.)