The title of this film makes no sense to me. When you think of a movie titled The Mummy, you are most likely thinking of the old Universal pictures with Boris Karloff or the Brendan Fraser films from the 1990s (or if you are a terrible person, you might be thinking of the abomination that starred Tom Cruise a while back.) But those films were all essentially connected. The later films were more or less remakes of the original. They took different slants on the story, but they are all still essentially explorers and archeologists coming across an Egyptian mummy coming to life.
This film is not that. This film is about a little American girl who gets possessed by an Egyptian demon. She is sort of mummy-like. She does get wrapped in strips of gauze or whatever, but it is nothing like those previous films. So, why call it The Mummy? I kind of get why they added Lee Cronin to the front ot the title, that helps differentiate it from the other Mummy films. I have to admit, when I first saw it, I thought, who the heck is Lee Cronin?
I don’t think he’s an incredibly well-known name. He’s probably best known for directing The Evil Dead Rise. That makes sense because this Mummy film has more in common with those new Evil Dead movies than any of the other Mummy films. Which brings me back to why they named it The Mummy in the first place. According to Wikipedia, Jason Blumhouse approached Lee Cronin with the idea of remaking The Mummy. He wasn’t too keen on it, but then sat down and wrote a much more horror-inflected film. They call that a re-imagining, but really, I’d still say this has little in common with the other films. My guess is that this is more of a marketing scheme than anything else. People have heard of The Mummy and everything, it seems, has to be connected to some earlier IP anymore.
None of this really matters, of course. What matters is whether this film is any good. My answer, sadly, is not really. It works best as a mystery and family drama, but when it moves into gore-filled horror (which is large chunks of the film, especially towards the end), I lost interest.
Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) is an American TV journalist living in Cairo with his pregnant wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), and their two children, Katie (Natalie Grace) and Sebastian (Shylo Molina). On the day he learns that he has been offered a job he very much wants in New York, Katie gets kidnapped. The police are no help. Despite evidence that she might have been groomed (someone was secretly giving her candy), they point the suspicion back at the family.
Fast forward eight years, and the family is living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with Larissa’s mother, Carmen Santiago (Verónica Falcón). Katie is still missing, but Larissa did have her baby, now a young girl, Maud (Billie Roy).
A plane crashes in Aswan, Egypt. Inside is a giant sarcophagus. Inside that, they find Katie wrapped in the stuff they wrap mummies in. She’s alive and has been taken to the hospital. Despite the fact that she is either unable or refuses to speak, has clear signs of abuse and self-harm, and has had to be sedated, the doctors clear her to fly home, and there the Cannons decide to just keep her at home. They refuse to take her to a local hospital or get her any sort of mental help, even when she begins acting even more erratically and terrifyingly.
Honestly, I had a hard time getting past this stupidity. The poor girl clearly needed help, and the family continually refused to give her any. They were all a bit in shock, and certainly the parents felt guilty for losing her that day. The mom is also a nurse, so she has some medical training, but that should have made her even more aware that Katie needed help.
But this is a horror movie, and we need our jump scares. When I could push that complaint away, I was able to enjoy parts of the film. The dad starts talking to one of the Cairo detectives (May Calamawy), and they slowly piece together what happened to Katie. This part of the film was the most interesting. I mean, the actual answers are horror movie nonsense, but it kept me tuned in.
But the film is more interested in gross-out violence. There are strong hints of The Exorcist and The Evil Dead throughout the film. Katie is possessed by evil. She talks in a satanic voice. She does crazy stuff. She possesses the other kids. There is vomiting and blood, and all sorts of goo. It is all done in a way that I found uninteresting. Maybe I’m just getting too old for that stuff, or maybe it just wasn’t done all that well. I dunno.
But hey, it was still better than that Tom Cruise film.
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HEY, happy fuckin 4th of July