I was still flush with the recent pleasant news that Brendan Fraser and cinematic goddess Rachel Weisz (woof!) were returning in a new (and hopefully better than the third entry) Mummy movie when I first heard about Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, which premiered in theaters this past April. LC’s The Mummy tries to reanimate bandage boy for the twenty first century, but with a twist. TV correspondent Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) is living with his family in Cairo, Egypt for his job when his eight year old daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) is abducted from her home by a stranger. The girl seemingly vanishes into thin air, and the heart-broken Cannon family move back to the US. Eight years later, the US embassy in Egypt calls them to report that Katie has been found alive...kinda...sort of. Katie (now played by Natalie Grace) had been a bound prisoner in a sealed ancient Egyptian sarcophagus, and the experience has left her in a horrific zombie-like state.
If you’re wondering who Lee Cronin is, he directed the fun (and really gory) Evil Dead Rise, which not only was a huge hit, but its success also revived the moribund Evil Dead franchise (Evil Dead Burn will be released in July 2026). While I was never a big fan of the Evil Rise series, Cronin’s take, with a family under siege by supernatural forces, was riveting because he made you care about the characters. That’s the same theme that he tries with his Mummy movie, only now it’s a family under siege by an ancient Egyptian curse, but it doesn’t work very well here. One of the problems is that the Cannon family are allowed to take Katie back home with them, despite her catatonic state, along with the fact that her body is clearly in a very nasty state of decay. I’m no medical expert, but the doctors telling the family in the film that all Katie needs right now is love really doesn’t ring true. This young lady needs to be in a hospital, stat.
And you would think that both the Egyptian and American governments would take far more interest in a case of a girl managing to remain alive after being sealed within a sarcophagus for several years. This certainly sounds like an X-File, a strange case that calls for rigorous scientific investigation into zombie Katie. Even The Exorcist had Regan (Linda Blair) undergo extensive medical testing before the spooky stuff happened. But there’s none of that here. Cronin seems hell-bent on getting weird little Katie home with her family as soon as possible so the film can become a derivative clone of Exorcist, while seemingly forgetting that one of the main reasons the original Exorcist worked so well was because it treated its audience with respect by paying attention to the little details. But with LC’s The Mummy, the little details get swept away in favor of shock scares that—when you think about them later—didn’t make any sense.
Another problem is that LC’s The Mummy takes place in two locations, modern day Egypt and New Mexico, USA. And, granted, I’ve haven’t visited either of these places. But the film's sets clearly have a very weird vibe to them—in that they don’t look anything like the regions they’re supposed to represent. The Egyptian sets look like they’re right out of the 1940s—so much so that I initially assumed this movie was a period piece, until they started using cell phones and other 21st century tech. The Cannon family house, supposedly located in the American Southwest, looks more like a Gothic Eastern European palace that the Addams Family would feel at home in. Add to all of this the fact that LC’s The Mummy is also so badly lit that I was constantly having trouble making out what was going on half the time. LC’s The Mummy falls short of properly reviving The Wrapped One, so here’s hoping the upcoming Mummy film with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz will put a spring in the step of the old tomb creeper. --SF
Comments
Post a Comment