'Lee Cronin's The Mummy' Feels Too Much Like an 'Exorcist' and 'Evil Dead' Rip-Off | Review

Who doesn't love a good Mummy movie? One of history's greatest oddities, it's no wonder that there's so much curiosity and intrigue when it comes to the mummified undead, and, of course, that obsession started with the 1932 monster classic, The Mummy. One of the crown jewels of Universal's Monsters, alongside Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster, Boris Karloff's original classic isn't really so much a horror movie as it is an atmospheric psychological thriller, and it's easily aged a lot better than many of its monstrous peers.

Still, when most film fans these days hear the word "Mummy," they're almost undoubtedly thinking of Brendan Fraser's pulpy, action-packed adventure movies that rebooted the series. That series has become so popular and beloved that a fourth installment with much of the original cast is now in development. It's a wise move from Universal, considering the studio became infamous for its disastrous attempt to kickstart an MCU-like expanded universe of its classic monster characters with Tom Cruise's disastrous 2017 reboot.

The swashbuckling Fraser trilogy may be undeniably entertaining, and Cruise's failed reboot was ... whatever it was. But it has been literal decades since there has been a Mummy movie that truly leans into thrills and scares. It's for that exact reason why there was a lot of excitement when it was announced that Lee Cronin, who successfully revived another iconic horror franchise with the excellent Evil Dead Rise, would be directing a fully horror-centric Mummy film alongside Blumhouse and Atomic Monster. That's a bona fide recipe for success, but unfortunately, Lee Cronin's The Mummy is so focused on replicating other horror movies and relying on familiar tropes that it honestly has very little in common with the bandaged monster it's supposed to be about.

What Is 'Lee Cronin's The Mummy' About?

Despite Lee Cronin's The Mummy being developed by Blumhouse, whose close relationship with Universal led to a few Monsters-related adaptations in The Invisible Man and Wolf Man, Cronin's movie isn't officially connected to any of Universal's previous incarnations of the character since the new film is actually a Warner Bros. production. Instead of bringing Imhotep back from the dead for the dozenth time, Lee Cronin's The Mummy chooses to tell a more independent story about an American family who suffers a terrible tragedy when their oldest child, Katie (Emily Mitchell), is abducted during their stay in Egypt.

Eight years later, the Cannon family gets the shock of a lifetime when they get a hugely unexpected phone call — not only has their daughter been found, she's alive. That being said, the Katie (the older version of whom is played by Natalie Grace) that her parents and siblings reunite with is anything but okay, as it soon becomes apparent that something much more sinister happened to the young girl all those years ago. As the Cannon's take their cursed child home, an Egyptian detective (May Calamawy) tries to solve the mystery behind Katie's disappearance.

From the moment the first trailer for Lee Cronin's The Mummy was released, it drew immediate comparisons to the director's Evil Dead Rise for its core family dynamic, the gross-out body humor, and a villain who gleefully taunts its victims. That's by no means a bad thing, especially given how well the earlier film turned out, but the problem with The Mummy is that it seems so beholden to being an Evil Dead-type story that it forgets to incorporate elements that pertain to its title concept.

Yes, the movie partially takes place in Egypt. Yes, it has a bandage here and there. Yes, there's a part where a beetle crawls its way inside someone. But, whenever it seems like Lee Cronin's The Mummy is about to build on those interesting ideas, it makes the frustrating decision to fall back into familiar territory. We're not even talking about Evil Dead Rise in this context, as the movie seems particularly obsessed with ripping off key plot points and aesthetics from The Exorcist movies in an almost flagrant sense. (At least it's still better than Exorcist: Believer). If one were to watch just the entire third act without any prior context, it's hard to say that people would guess this is a Mummy movie in the first place.

The Mummy backdrop feeling more like a gimmick than a central core concept is disappointing, but how do Cronin's skills as a director of horror sequences stack up? Well, Cronin's filmography thus far has shown a knack for disturbing visuals and eerie sound design. That's certainly on display here, with some great practical effects and creative sound choices, but these elements, combined with the movie overall, yield mixed results. There are some moments that are extremely tense and genuinely creepy, especially thanks to a very strong performance from Natalie Grace as the titular pseudo-mummy. However, there are others that feel like they're trying way too hard to achieve that effect in places where they aren't warranted, making for some over-directed and over-edited moments.

'Lee Cronin's The Mummy's Characters and Story Should Have Stayed Buried

She may be more Deadite than Mummy, but Natalie Grace's titular villain is the film's strongest element by far. Sadly, the same cannot be said for her co-stars. So much of The Mummy's surprisingly beefy 2-hour and 17-minute runtime focuses on the Cannon family just pretending that the traumatic experience that befell Katie never happened, which leads it to committing the cardinal sin that all horror movies should avoid whenever possible — woefully illogical characters making astronomically poor decisions. There are some truly baffling choices that the film's characters make that border on plot holes. There's even a moment where a major character dies under extremely suspicious circumstances late into the film, and every single one of the family members moves on like it was just completely normal.

Even with the odd, funny moment now and then to add a bit of humanity and levity, the members of the Cannon family are woefully underdeveloped, with none of that long runtime feeling like it wants to take any time to learn about or flesh them out. It's a criticism that extends to the entire cast, but none suffer more from this than Jack Reynor's lead protagonist. Both the character itself and Reynor's performance just do not work at all. On the character side, Charlie Cannon is given an incredibly generous amount of screentime, but somehow also comes across as the least developed character in a story that's already filled with them. As for the performance, Reynor's consistently blank expression in the face of just about every horrific thing the movie throws at him makes it even harder to sympathize with a consistently bare-bones character.

Unfortunately for Lee Cronin's The Mummy, the movie shares so many stylistic and narrative similarities with Evil Dead Rise, which does the new movie no favors. Sure, the performance of its lead monster and some impressive practical effects will likely keep those looking for a quick (albeit unmemorable) horror fix, but its story and characters miss everything that made Evil Dead Rise such a home run. That was a film that featured a hero and a villain who showed two sides of themes pertaining to the pressures of motherhood, and it managed to develop all those characters in just an hour and a half.

The Mummy is almost an hour longer and has a family haunted by a demonic force too, and yet it doesn't feel like it's saying much of anything. It's an ambitious attempt to reinvent the Mummy mythos, but its insistence on following in the footsteps of Cronin's previous films, the preceding Mummy movies, and other iconic horror films in general leaves what could have been a great spin on a classic concept buried in the shadow of giants.

Lee Cronin's The Mummy premieres in theaters on April 17, 2026.