Out of all the Universal Monsters, the Mummy is rather underused. He never gets picked as often as, say, Dracula, Frankenstein or the Wolfman, and that’s probably because of his apparent limitations. Storytellers don’t ever want to part with the creature’s origins, and quite frankly, most don’t know what to do with him. Then comes Lee Cronin, the Irish filmmaker who doesn’t stick to the rule book, apropos of IP. No, the Evil Dead Rises director does what others have failed to do, and that’s simply updating the Mummy. No longer is this monster contained to Egypt, nor is he just a glorified stock villain under someone else’s command.
Okay, so Lee Cronin’s The Mummy does kick off in Egypt, but sooner than later, the story travels abroad. In fact, all the place and time jumping gets a bit heady before things finally have a chance to settle down. It’s once the main characters’ young daughter Katie (Natalie Grace, Emily Mitchell) is found, eight years after being abducted by a strange woman, does the movie take a chance to breathe. Mind you, Cronin is not one to flesh out his human characters too much; he saves his attention for the threats. You don’t leave this movie knowing a whole lot about the Cannon family, yet Cronin compensates in other areas.
While the Mummy isn’t all that scary to modern audiences, Cronin corrects that flaw in his new take. Overly so, I might add. The director’s penchant for goo and macabre is on overdrive, and autopilot, in this movie. For every one of Katie’s creepy scenes, you can sense Cronin not only indulging himself, but also channeling his past work. The new approach to the Mummy is, apparently, very Deadite-coded. The unconventional appearance of the namesake, who here is more of a demon that’s passed from vessel to vessel, lends to that opinion. Going unwrapped means Grace’s character is, for the most part, a putrid zombie who feels almost out of place in a movie called The Mummy.
I may be in the minority when I say the “spider walk” is my least favorite moment in The Exorcist‘s re-release. It feels too out of place with everything else. Whereas in The Evil Dead, essentially a self-confessed horror-comedy, the physical humor is par for the course. However, seeing Katie Deadite-crawl and contort here, on top of all the gross-out humor, gets a bit old. In general, The Mummy has trouble navigating its own tones. One minute it’s life-or-death serious, the next it’s irreverent as hell. Cronin bends over backwards to make you squirm and nervously laugh during certain set-pieces, but once again, that schtick clashes with the heavier stuff. When you stop to think about it, so much of what’s happening with Katie’s possession is downright depressing. The part where the parents (Jack Reynor, Laia Costa) learn what happened to their daughter is particularly awful.
Cronin does what he does best, and that’s Evil Dead (and split diopters). And after watching The Mummy, it’s pretty clear that he really wanted to make another one of those movies. If he was cut out of the next two Evil Dead installments, I’d be more forgiving. Yet, he is involved with them (as a producer), which makes his more derivative choices in this otherwise watchable movie confusing. For Cronin, I guess old habits are just too hard to break.
The Mummy plays in theaters nationwide starting on April 17.
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