'Lee Cronin's The Mummy' review: Entombed by its own excess

Courtesy of Warner Bros./New Line Cinema.

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On some level, it is refreshing to see a studio promote a director rather than an actor in its billing. That kind of branding implies authorship, confidence, and vision. But that sort of recognition usually has to be earned, and while Lee Cronin has shown flashes of style and a fondness for the grotesque, his résumé is still fairly slim. With just two features under his belt, one of them the most recent “Evil Dead” reboot, it feels a bit premature to slap his name directly onto the marquee. “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” suggests a calling card, a statement, and if you are going to attach your name that boldly to a legacy title, the expectation is that you deliver something definitive.

It is easy to see why the branding exists. Universal has spent the better part of the last decade fumbling attempts to restart its monster universe, not to mention the radioactive memory of the Tom Cruise-led fiasco from a decade ago. This version clearly wants to distance itself from all of that, and the marketing has gone out of its way to remind audiences that Brendan Fraser is very much not involved. Fair enough. But if the goal is to announce a singular vision, the finished product does not quite live up to the confidence of its own packaging.

Cronin’s take on “The Mummy” has surface-level intrigue and an initially clever hook, one that flirts with a “Pet Sematary”-adjacent sense of moral unease. For a time, it gestures toward grief, parental guilt, and the emotional fallout of loss. Unfortunately, it gradually collapses into an overlong, cacophonous slog that trades atmosphere for excess and culminates in a third act that plays like “The Exorcist” smashed headfirst into “Evil Dead,” with volume replacing tension. You may not have seen this version of “The Mummy,” but the movie wears its influences so openly that the experience often feels eerily familiar.

At 134 minutes, the film badly overstates its case. There are moments where the shock value jolts the movie to life, including a gloriously gooey toenail-clipping sequence that stands out as one of its better practical-effects highlights. These scenes remind you Cronin has a real affection for corporeal horror. But the underlying narrative beats are too familiar and too undercooked to sustain that runtime. Even when the story attempts to reroute around expected genre signposts, the destination never quite changes.

Rather than globe-trotting spectacle, the film opts for a scaled-down, domestic approach. We begin in Cairo, where a young girl named Katie (Natalie Grace, whose game for just about anything Cronin throws at her) disappears, only to be conveniently discovered eight years later in the wreckage of a plane crash, entombed in a sarcophagus. Authorities suggest she was likely a victim of human trafficking, a genuinely unsettling premise that the film introduces and then almost immediately abandons. Beyond a few cursory mentions, this potentially harrowing angle never develops into anything meaningful.

Katie’s parents, played by Jack Reynor and Laia Costa, have since relocated to New Mexico with their two younger children. Against what feels like the advice of basic human instinct, they decide to bring Katie home, hopeful that familiar surroundings might restore her fragile physical and mental state. Reynor and Costa do what they can, but the script gives them little to work with beyond stubborn insistence and genre-blind optimism. The makeup and prosthetics attempt to render Katie as a practically realized figure, though the effect is inconsistent, often resembling Sloth from “The Goonies” more than something unsettlingly uncanny.

It is immediately clear that Katie is not okay. She does not speak, her limbs are locked in corpse-like contortions, and, at one point, she nearly levitates off her bed. Yet when the father cautiously suggests a temporary relocation or possible medical intervention, the mother insists she knows how to care for her daughter, and the film expects us to take this debate seriously. The sheer obliviousness of the characters becomes unintentionally comic. As Katie’s skin begins to fall off and her teeth emit a constant clicking, the film’s internal logic starts to erode entirely.

By the time the narrative barrels toward its thunderously loud climax, it feels less like escalation and more like desperation. The finale staggers through what feels like a dozen endings before settling on one that carries neither emotional weight nor narrative justification. There is a sense that several of the bloodiest moments were lifted wholesale from unused “Evil Dead” ideas, which might have been invigorating if the film had embraced a more playful tone. Instead, Cronin treats the material with solemn seriousness, a choice that drains the excess of its potential fun and amplifies the script’s structural weaknesses.

The film also carries an unpleasantly mean streak. Aside from, you know, an eight-year child being abducted and turned into this creature (which is a problem in its own right and handled very poorly), character deaths often feel less like consequences and more like punishment, especially given how thinly sketched many of these people are. A notable bright spot arrives in a side plot involving a missing persons investigator in Cairo, played by May Calamawy, who brings a welcome sense of grounded urgency. Her storyline hints at a more compelling version of the movie that never quite materializes.

To Cronin’s credit, the ambition is evident. Scenes like a funeral spiraling into a full-blown splatterfest (complete with embalming fluid oozing out of a corpse) or a possessed child spewing obscenities demonstrate a confident grasp of gore and genre mechanics (though I think it’s safe to say, in the history of demonic movies, hearing children say expletives has lost some of its luster) and the sound design in particular is impressively immersive. But the film consistently undercuts itself when it tries to balance those extremes with its darker thematic interests. You cannot lightly gesture toward child abduction and trafficking and then treat those ideas as disposable window dressing. 

In the end, the film’s biggest problem is its refusal to let its characters behave like rational people in an irrational situation. Horror does not demand realism, but it does require internal coherence. When the film abandons logic altogether, it forfeits tension and replaces it with noise. What we are left with is an uneven, messy ride that looks and sounds like a real movie, often an expensive one, but never comes together in a way that feels satisfying, earned, or emotionally honest.

Perhaps the cruelest irony is that this version of “The Mummy” could have benefited from the very thing it works so hard to distance itself from: a little levity. A bit of charm. Maybe even a touch of Brendan Fraser energy to cut through the self-seriousness. As it stands, “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” boldly announces itself as an auteur statement but leaves you wondering whether the director has quite figured out what he wants to say.

Grade: C-

LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY is now playing in theaters.