Movie Reviews
Movie Review: ‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ offers a teenage-girl mummy and a messy, overlong gorefest
The tagline for “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is “Some things are meant to stay buried.” That also applies to the misguided “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” which should definitely stay deep underground for eternity.
Let’s face it, Mummy has always been the lamest of the classic, old-school monsters, a grunting, slow-moving and poorly bandaged zombie. Dracula has a bite, after all, and Frankenstein’s monster has superhuman strength. What’s Mummy going to do? Lumber us to death?
Cronin evidently believes there’s still life in this old Egyptian cursed dude, despite being portrayed as the dim-witted straight guy in old Abbott and Costello movies or appearing as high priest Imhotep in the Brendan Fraser franchise.
So Cronin has resurrected The Mummy but grafted it onto the body of a demon possession movie. His Mummy is actually not a man at all, but a teenage girl who is controlled by an ancient demon and grunts a lot.
“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” — the title alone is a flex, like he gets his name on this thing like Guillermo del Toro, John Carpenter or Tyler Perry? — is overly long, constantly ping-pongs between Cairo and Albuquerque, New Mexico, and after a sedate first half, plows into a gross-out bloodfest at the end that doesn’t match the rest of the film.
Cronin, behind the surprise 2023 horror hit “Evil Dead Rise,” is weirdly obsessed by toes and teeth, and while he gets kudos for having an Arabic-speaking main actor (a superb May Calamawy) and portraying real-feeling Middle Eastern characters, there’s a feeling that no one wanted to edit his weirder impulses, like some light, inter-family cannibalism.
It starts with the abduction of a Cairo-based family’s young daughter, who resurfaces eight years later in a 3,000-year-old sarcophagus, catatonic and showing symptoms of severe trauma. The sarcophagus literally has dropped out of the sky as part of a plane crash.
This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Shylo Molina, left, and Billie Roy in a scene from “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy.” Credit: AP/Patrick Redmond
“She just needs our care and support and time,” the dad (Jack Reynor, remaining good despite the slog) says until his daughter starts moving like a feral creature, doing horror-movie bone cracking poses, projectile vomiting, creeping behind walls and eating bugs. You know, like most teenagers.
He teams up with our Cairo-based cop to unravel the mystery of what happened to his eldest daughter, who starts messing with her family — levitating some, hypnotizing others to slam their heads into wood beams, all with a creepy, sing-song voice. It’s The Mummy as influencer.
“We can’t fix her if we don’t know what happened to her,” says dad, who goes so far as consulting with an expert on the cursive writing system used for Ancient Egypt.
Cronin leans into all the horror cliches — storms, dollhouses, flickering lights, muttered spells, whacked-out cults, bathtubs filled with rotting water, skittering insects and random coyotes — to establish a staid and eerie foundation, only to go over-the-top gorefest at the end, which prompted laughter at a recent showing.
This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows May Calamawy in a scene from “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy.” Credit: AP/Quim Vives
The Egyptian-U.S. detective story grafted onto this monster movie is a nice touch but gets lost, and there’s perhaps the weirdest use of The Band’s classic song “The Weight.” (Cronin also uses a Bruce Springsteen song).
In publicity material for the movie, Cronin reveals that he made his movie after realizing there hasn’t been a truly terrifying version made of “The Mummy.” He’s right. Even after his own offering.
“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release that is in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong disturbing violent content, gore, language and brief drug use. Running time: 133 minutes. Half a star out of four.
movie review
TOY STORY 5
Running time: 102 minutes. PG (some thematic elements, rude humor). In theaters.
Long before ChatGPT was a household name, Hollywood had been making AI the villain for decades — from HAL 9000 to Skynet to Agent Smith.
Yet the most emotionally involving spin on the terrors of tech in ages arrives not from groundbreaking sci-fi, but the smart, wonderful and tremendously funny fifth “Toy Story” movie.
That’s a surprise, since it’s a film that I really hoped would never happen. After middling “4,” which was a giant step down from the heartbreaking third, the world was more than ready for Woody and Buzz to ride off into the sunset. Woody actually did.
Well, it’s good that Tom Hanks and Tim Allen got back behind the mike, because the digital age gives Pixar’s playthings a renewed sense of purpose and atypically high stakes. Usually the gang helps a young person stay in touch with their childhood. This time, they save one in progress.
That’s the formative years of little Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), the girl who inherited the dolls from Andy (who’s now, like, 40) in the last movie. She’s 8 years old, paralyzed by shyness and totally friendless. Desperate, Bonnie begs her parents to buy her a Lilypad, an interactive touchscreen that’s all the rage at school.
Yes, the baddie that Woody (Hanks), Buzz (Allen) and Jessie (Joan Cusack) must face this time is an alarmingly cute tablet, voiced by Greta Lee.
So, rather than humanity’s fears of artificial intelligence taking control of the nuclear arsenal or replacing us with cyborgs, director Andrew Stanton’s “5” taps into a much more immediate concern: screens rewiring kids’ minds.
Much like when action figure Buzz arrived, sigh, 31 years ago, the toys are mortified by the mysterious intruder and her luminescent ilk. As they look across their neighborhood, all they can see for blocks are glowing blue windows with zombie youths staring into the 10×10 void.
The end is nigh, they think. How can a cowboy, cowgirl and a space cadet compete against a reactive mini-computer that connects a lonely child to the entire planet?
But these toys aren’t ready for the dark recesses of eBay just yet. They go head to head — or plastic to plastic — with Lilypad, whom Lee gives a voice that’s both bestie and “Mean Girls.”
You may recall lovebirds Woody and Bo Peep went off on their own at the end of the last chapter. Of course, they find their way back, but Jessie is running things now. That’s a refreshing and appropriate switch-up. Cusack’s maternal performance is better suited to this particular adventure than Hanks’ “old buddy, old pal” delivery.
After a sleepover mishap, Jessie winds up lost at another house — her first one, it turns out — where a girl named Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris) lives. And it’s there we meet perhaps the best new character in this franchise since 1995: Smarty Pants.
The real misfit toys aren’t the OG crew, we learn, but obsolete computer devices from the aughts. One is Conan O’Brien’s Smarty Pants, a hysterical, hyperactive box that teaches tykes how to use the toilet. He’s been powered down for years and therefore goes berserk when juiced up.
O’Brien is — and I’m sure he’d agree — a toy trapped in a man’s body. He’s practically typecasting. And his demented acting is so energetic and untethered, you can picture Disney security guards hauling him out of the recording studio. I mean that in a good way.
There’s also a lot of fun mined from a shipment of misplaced Buzzes. We check in on the look-alikes occasionally as they morph into a phalanx of determined Navy SEALs to eventually join Jessie and Co.
“Five” is arguably the first new “Toy Story” film to be both watched and understood by the kids of the 1995 original’s millennial audience. That shared experience is very moving all by itself.
But, even more poignantly, who can teach these young parents this vital lesson in 21st-century child-rearing better than their own toys?
3.5/5 stars
The notoriously treacherous hurdles that Hong Kong telecommunications company i-Cable used to put in front of customers looking to unsubscribe from its internet and pay-TV services throughout the 2000s and early 2010s provide the premise of this Kafkaesque comedy-drama – an alternately hilarious and heartbreaking case of raging against the system.
By Susan Granger
With the release of his 35th movie, it’s obvious that Steven Spielberg is not just a good story-teller, he’s a GREAT story-teller.
The suspenseful tale he spins this time is “Disclosure Day” about the U.S. government’s attempt to keep the truth about UFOs secret.
Sinister Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) heads WARDEX (Waived Reporting, Development and Extraction), a quasi-Defense Department agency from which cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) has stolen a powerful device of alien origin along with extensive classified information and video files.
Although his girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) is held hostage by Scanlon’s underlings, Daniel manages to free her and get away, igniting a manhunt.
Supported by WARDEX’s Director of Biological Assets, paternal Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), whistleblower Daniel believes people have a right to know about the coverup, dating back to the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico, paranoia and the Nixon Administration.
Meanwhile in the middle of a TV broadcast, Kansas City, Missouri, meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) suddenly begins making bizarre, guttural clicking sounds which make no sense – except to Daniel, who recognizes the alien code.
To the bewilderment of her boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell’s son), Margaret can suddenly speak foreign languages – like Korean and Russian – and manipulate the minds of everyone she encounters.
What Daniel and Margaret have in common is a terrifying childhood trauma that neither wants to remember. To tell you more would ruin the film’s many white-knuckle surprises and insights about faith in a supreme deity and the philosophical essence of humanity.
Scripted by David Koepp from Steven Spielberg’s story, it revolves around a nefarious conspiracy, cloaked in sci-fi mystery, tracing back to “E.T.” and “Close Encounters of a Third Kind.” And it’s a timely topic since former President Obama said he believes aliens are real, prompting President Trump to accuse him of revealing “classified information.”
Sure – there are some gaping plot loopholes – but cinematographer Janusz Kaminski dazzles with a high-speed train chase. Buoyed by John Williams’ throwback score – on the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Disclosure Day” is an exciting 9, playing in theaters now.
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Susan Granger
Westport resident Susan Granger grew up in Hollywood, studied journalism with Pierre Salinger at Mills College and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in Journalism. In addition to writing for newspapers and magazines, she has appeared on radio and television as an anchorwoman and movie critic for many years. Read all her reviews at susangranger.com.
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