Lee Cronin's The Mummy is what happens when someone really wants to make an Evil Dead movie, but only has the rights to Universal's back catalog.
It's not like Cronin doesn't have the talent to back up such lofty goals. His Evil Dead Rise was, at least for most, one of the better Evil Dead sequels around, and it's not like Universal has been doing anything with the Mummy franchise.
The problem is that Cronin has chosen to work with two very different films, and either refuses or is unable to navigate the waters between them.
On one hand, you have a terrifying slow burning horror story about a family losing their daughter in a strange land, where customs and history extend back thousands of years, and nobody wants to help them.
On the other end, there's a silly romp full of gross out gags, visual trickery , and weirdly horny demons who can't stop talking. Within seconds, and often in the same scene, Cronin's film goes from horrific footage of children in danger to a peak-Sam Raimi monster propositioning for sex stop a kitchen table.
The result are, to put it lightly, maddening. A tale of two movies fighting against one another, resulting in a spectacular first half hour, and another 100 minutes of tedium.
The first act is almost worth the visit. In it, Cronin builds a tremendously effective nightmare scenario, where a little girl is kidnapped from her home in Egypt. She and her parents are immigrants to a foreign culture, and when she goes missing, nobody takes the concern seriously.
Around this is the mystery of a sarcophagus buried in an orchard beyond the city borders, and another family with secrets of their own.
For a moment, it appears as if Cronin has found a way to bring the story of The Mummy to modernity with panache and intrigue.
Then, the story abruptly shifts to America, to a large remote mansion we've seen a hundred times before, and the plot takes a backseat to cheap jump scares, poor writing, and lifts from The Exorcist.
Cronin's bag of tricks proves shallow and quickly starts to repeat itself. After fifteen minutes, you've seen all the ways he knows how to craft a scare. It's always either a loud noise, an abrupt cut, or a combination of the two. Even when he borrows an entire sequence from The Exorcist, he can't help but water it down by ignoring what made that movie so effective.
By the end, characters behave erratically to keep the script moving, and others teleport halfway around the world to deliver hamfisted exposition in convoluted ways. Towards the finale, I no longer cared about the story to the point that I began to calculate the odds of anyone owning a VHS player, as a late plot point hinges on people watching a tape to understand what's going on.
And yet, there's the first act, which is fabulous. It is tremendously moody and scary, and it barely has any violence. It is rich with great acting, a superb setup, and a truly horrifying scenario that kept me engaged. The moment the story shifted into a contractually obligated version of Evil Dead, The Mummy lost me entirely.
It's not as bad as the Tom Cruise one, but it's nowhere near as fun, of even as delightfully inventive as the Stephen Sommers romp from 25 years ago.
Instead, Lee Cronin's The Mummy is more like Lee Cronin's Reference Gallery. It's more concerned with riffing on past masters than it is telling a good story, which makes the whole thing feel exactly as stilted and lifeless as the titular monster.
