‘The Mummy’ review: Gross horror flick is just ‘The Exorcist’ with gauze

I never thought I’d miss the Scorpion King.

But as gallons of oily vomit spewed and bloody skin got gruesomely peeled off a girl’s leg in “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” The Rock’s rocky acting debut in “The Mummy Returns” looked mighty appealing in retrospect.

Come back to me, Dwayne!

I know what you’re thinking: Who the hell is Lee Cronin? He’s the director of “Evil Dead Rise,” and purportedly his name has been tacked onto the title of his diabolically long and determinedly uninteresting new film, Wes Craven style, to separate his Egyptian monster from that of the surprisingly enduring Brendan Fraser series.

Well, it’s different, all right.

For instance, in 1999’s “The Mummy,” I’m pretty sure there was not a scene in which a demonic child feasts on the flesh of a dead old woman’s body while formaldehyde dribbles out onto the floor.

I also don’t recall any characters brutally receiving an accidental tracheotomy or being forced to watch a stomach-churning toenail-clipping sequence.

Do these stylistic and narrative departures constitute a smart shakeup of the old mummy formula, as Cronin’s movie promises to do? Eh, not really. The director mostly reshapes what a mummy actually is to suit his lackluster whims. 

The title creature, which is instead possessed by an evil spirit rather than eternally cursed, bears a much closer resemblance to Regan from “The Exorcist” than angry old Imhotep. Even having the action commence in the Middle East only to leap to a spooky American house is conspicuously similar to the plot of William Friedkin’s classic.

If only it aspired to the same quality.

The chilling beginning of “The Mummy” has misleading promise. The little daughter (Natalie Grace) of a Cairo-based American journalist named Charlie (Jack Reynor) is kidnapped by a witchy woman through a hole in their garden gate. He frantically searches during a sandstorm, but he never finds her. It’s a parent’s worst nightmare.   

Eight years later, Charlie’s back home in Albuquerque with his wife Larissa (Laia Costa) and their other two kids, when the family learns the missing sibling has been miraculously found alive. But there’s a catch. Katie’s not a sweet little angel anymore — she’s a corpse-like creepzilla prone to violent outbursts that would make Father Karras come racing over with his crucifix.

The overwhelmed parents somehow manage to get this disgusting freak back from Egypt on a plane by simply administering a sedative. Easy!

That’s one of Cronin’s storytelling conveniences that doesn’t make a lick of sense. The supernatural entity inhabiting Katie could keep her body alive for nearly a decade in a sarcophagus without food or water, but propofol still works like a charm?

In New Mexico, guilt-ridden Larissa is blinded to the obvious fact that her daughter is Satan’s second cousin. And Katie’s abuela Carmen (Verónica Falcón) gets some “WTF?!” laughs.  

And then commences an interminable stretch in which can-do Charlie works to get to the bottom of what happened to Katie with the help of a Cairo investigator (May Calamawy). But we already know what happened. The movie is called “The Mummy.” She’s a mummy. 

The titular terror’s repetitive and nauseating pastimes include scurrying around like a centipede, banging on the walls a bunch and grossing out critics. Unfortunately Katie is at her scariest on the movie’s poster. Onscreen, she never rises above weird. And all the body-horror yuckiness is similar to “Evil Dead Rise” only way less fun and more than half an hour longer. 

The film goes on and on and on. The Great Pyramid took less time to build. You start to feel like you’re the one who’s been trapped inside a sarcophagus for eight years. The explanation for what the identity of this nefarious presence is dumb. And by the time we reach the climax, a routine series of tortures, we’ve already long been desensitized to the gore.

More than once, I thought: This would end a lot sooner if Brendan Fraser could just heroically swing in on a rope.

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