“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is an example of how even exciting directors can turn in boring work.

Releasing on Friday, April 17, the film stars Jack Reynor and Laia Costa, playing distressed parents who must fend off the generic evils of a possessed daughter in a movie full of tired scares and even more tired drama.

The film does not play to Cronin’s strengths. His last feature, “Evil Dead Rise” from 2023 is a maliciously fun foray in the family possession subgenre of horror, which contains such titans as “The Exorcist” and “The Conjuring.” He knows how to direct shocking, crowd-pleasing presentations of pain and suffering — injecting a strong sense of visual style into what could otherwise be tired scares.

However, Cronin waters down his take on The Mummy with a story far more generic than his skills are deserving of. Instead of leaning full-tilt into his love of dark-comedy and gleeful sequences of gore, the film exemplifies an issue with many modern studio horror movies: fear of commitment.

Like many “The Conjuring” sequels and spin-offs, as well as most of Blumhouse’s paranormal horror flicks, “The Mummy” follows a strict, tired structure where an average family is confronted by a mysterious supernatural force that possesses one of the young and, between well-trodden jumpscares, is slowly explained by a series of experts who eventually help thwart the evil. Heard that one before?

The shame about “The Mummy” is that its conceit is a far richer one than any “Annabelle” or “Nun” film.

The tagline in the film’s teaser trailer, which says “What happened to Katie?,” promises a compelling mystery, and the opening act of the film establishes that. The youngest daughter of the main characters goes missing and, eight years later, is found in an ancient tomb.

The film opens with two genuinely effective scenes of mood-building, which present a far more unique film than the following hour and a half delivers. With a stylized title-card and even more stylized editing, this reimagining of “The Mummy” character seems to be loudly and proudly announcing that it’s not going to be like other Blumhouse horror movies. Sadly, that hope is quickly dashed.

Leading into the second act, the movie slows down. Then it speeds back up again, only to slow down again. Rinse and repeat.

“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is afraid to commit to its own premise and energy. Every scene of clue-chasing, as a cop and father try to figure out what happened to Katie, feels more like filler than anything actually fulfilling. Cronin, as quickly as possible, disregards the primary drama of his own film, which he wrote by himself, for another scene of lazy jumpscares sprinkled with some impressive gore effects — halting any sense of energy he began to build.

“The Mummy” is profoundly disappointing past its first act. The cast delivers compelling performances, only to be sidelined for a camera that chooses to gawk at a creepy kid that feels like a pale imitation of “The Excorcist’s” Reagan.

Character flaws, like those of the father character Charlie Cannon — played with great vulnerability by Jack Reynor — aren’t given the natural development they deserve.

Cannon is established as a vain, somewhat selfish broadcast journalist who still deeply cares for his family. But, for most of the runtime, he is treated as a generic family man until the film randomly remembers that it’s trying to be a family drama. So, it throws in an argument scene that has little-to-no bearing on the characters’ following actions.

Shylo Molina plays the younger brother in the film, Sebastián Cannon, who is established to feel some jealousy toward his sister in the film’s opening act before she is kidnapped, found and possessed by the film’s stock evil-spirit. The film, as it does with Charlie Cannon, seems to forget about this as he becomes a generic, angsty music-blasting teen for the rest of the runtime with little to no development. He’s just another body to get briefly possessed for the third act.

While the film attempts to juggle being a mean-spirited gore fest and a family drama, Cronin decides to throw in a cop plot that adds yet another genre into this mixing pot of half-baked attempts to be interesting.

At the very least, the cop plot is actually engaging and committed to its tone, unlike the haunted-house portion of the film, which takes up way too much of the runtime. The cop, Dalia Zaki, played with great intensity by May Calamawy, is one of the only characters that gets real development. She starts as an eager and scared rookie and turns into a badass detective that is easy to root for.

She, unlike the main plot of the film, is compelling to follow despite the shallowness of the film’s central mystery.

“The Mummy’s” issue, however, isn’t a case of being bloated with too many plot elements; rather, it’s how these pieces are put together.

Cronin seems to forget that the visual actions of the characters can be a tool to develop them, too. So, instead of using the scares as obstacles that the characters must succeed or fail to conquer, he pauses the film for meaningless haunted house frights.

Cronin’s attempt to create a mystery and family-drama wrapped in a dark horror-comedy is ambitious and respectable. However, his approach is cowardly.

Cronin’s film is just a symptom of studios’ fear to make modern horror films interesting. He uses the generic beats of every contemporary paranormal movie to carry concepts that are more deserving of bolder execution: An execution he is obviously capable of, as exemplified in “Evil Dead Rise.”

Like the titular Mummy, Cronin’s reboot is a thinly-wrapped corpse in a fancy tomb. One thinks they’re being met with something historic, but it’s just another generic horror film, dead-on-arrival.

Copy edited by Katie Peters