Lee Cronin's The Mummy certainly delivers on the gore and brutal violence, but it's centered around a half-cooked plot and a batch of characters that rarely seem to be paying attention to what's going on.
The Cannon family is living in Cairo, Egypt, where Charlie (Jack Reynor) works as a TV reporter. His wife Larissa (Laia Costa) is a nurse and is pregnant with their third child, after son Sebastián and their eldest, Katie. After Sebastián and Katie fight, she retreats to the backyard where she regularly meets a secret friend, Layla, and receives forbidden chocolates. On this day, Layla's mother (Hayat Kamille), a magician, is there. Katie vanishes without a trace.
Eight years later, the Cannons are back in the United States with youngest daughter Maud (Billie Roy) and the older Sebastián (Shylo Molina). They receive a call from Egypt: Katie has been found. But doctors warn that she's not herself, and she will need plenty of TLC before she comes around. Unfortunately, the longer Katie remains in the house, the more unsettling things begin to happen.
Lee Cronin's The Mummy — so titled to separate itself from Universal's copyrighted franchise — promised more of the intense shocks that Cronin's Evil Dead Rise delivered, and it does that, but it's as if someone forgot to fill in the rest of the blanks.
It's pretty clear from the start that Katie is not a case that will be nursed back to health with patience and love, especially when she escapes, skitters through the crawlspace like a large crab, and eats a live scorpion. It takes a good long while before the characters realize this, and the audience is waaay ahead of them.
The reporter Dad becomes obsessed with finding out what happened, and is often away from the picture while scary stuff is going on. But that's no excuse, because even when everyone's home, no one seems to notice anything. Plot threads are left dangling left and right as the movie sprawls out to a ridiculous 133 minutes, flipping back and forth between Cairo and the U.S. At one point, the only smart character, Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), flies from Cairo to the Cannon home, just to show them a videotape she's found.
But the real kicker is that Lee Cronin's The Mummy isn't a mummy movie at all; it's a demon movie, and about as bad as most of the other demon movies of the past few years. Let's hope there are no sequels planned and that this one is called "a wrap."
