Lee Cronin’s The Mummy

Directed by Lee Cronin, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy follows a couple (Jack Reynor’s Charlie and Laia Costa’s Larissa) as they slowly begin to realize that there’s something very wrong with their daughter (Natalie Grace’s Katie). Cronin, armed with his own screenplay, delivers a slow-moving yet consistently watchable endeavor that benefits from its cinematic, almost epic sensibilities and smattering of engrossing set-pieces, and there’s little doubt, certainly, that the recurring emphasis on the central mystery (ie what happened to Katie, exactly?) goes a long way towards sustaining one’s interest through the narrative’s meandering stretches. It is, in terms of said meandering stretches, increasingly impossible not to puzzle over Lee Cronin’s The Mummy‘s ludicrously padded-out 133 minute (!) running time (ie the film could (and should) have been streamlined to a more manageable (and appropriate) hour-and-a-half length), with the rather sluggish midsection generally (and unfortunately) diminishing the impact of the agreeably larger-than-life third act. (And it doesn’t help, either, that despite the movie’s predominantly grim and bleak atmosphere, the story concludes on an almost incongruously cheery note.) The final result is a decent piece of work that never becomes quite as enthralling or gripping as Cronin has obviously intended, and yet it’s equally clear that the filmmaker’s pointedly ambitious sensibilities compensate for a lot and, ultimately, confirm the picture’s place as a relatively memorable contemporary horror endeavor.

*** out of ****