Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Review: Plenty of Gore is Ineffective at a Sluggish Pace

While fans have fond memories of Scott Summers’ The Mummy starring Brendan Fraser, the franchise has struggled to follow up that success for the better part of twenty-five years. Even Tom Cruise, The Rock, and Jet Li could not do much to help the series deliver an average movie. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy does its best to break the curse that has seemingly descended on the franchise. However, an overly long flick runs out of steam too many times, even if it features some of the craziest moments in a 2026 horror movie.

What is Lee Cronin’s The Mummy about?

Charlie (Jack Reynor) and Larissa (Laia Costa) live in Cairo with their two kids, Katie (Emily Mitchell) and Sebastian (Dean Allen Williams). When Charlie gets a job offer to move the family to New York ahead of their third child, the parents get excited for a new start. However, when Katie goes missing, their lives are upended.

Eight years later, a plane crashes in the desert. Inside is a black tomb that holds a disfigured and greatly injured Katie (Natalie Grace), who suffers from malnourishment and an inability to speak. Charlie and Larissa bring Katie home to an older Sebastian (Shylo Molina), grandmother Carmen (Veronica Falcón), and their youngest daughter, Maud (Billie Roy). However, the original missing persons detective, Dalia (May Calamawy), suspects something is still wrong. Dalia is soon proven right.

Bloody, violent, stylized, and a mess, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy might be the most frustrating horror film of the year.

From the opening scenes, it is clear that Lee Cronin has pacing issues in his monster movie. The director of Evil Dead Rise and The Hole in the Ground had not made a movie over 96 minutes before Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. However, the bloat is clear, with this flick spanning a massive 133 minutes that buckles under the runtime. Tension dissolves despite some frightening payoffs. The runtime and pacing feel more in line with the uber-runtime director’s cuts of 90-minute classics of the horror genre. Unfortunately, this version does not work and quickly becomes a slog.

Additionally, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy feels too similar to his other movies. There is no denying that Evil Dead Rise features some of the coolest split diopter shots in recent memory. However, Cronin and DP David Garbett overuse the visual trick. There genuinely must be more than thirty in the movie, which lessens their effectiveness with every subsequent shot. Making matters worse, several feel like repeat images from Evil Dead Rise.

The CGI used throughout the movie really struggles to land with the same potency of the makeup effects. It becomes a visual dichotomy that both elevates the power of the practical effects and makes the CG look even worse. Wounds are vile and disgusting. The CG scorpion is abysmal, as is the choice to have sand floating through the air in at least five sequences. They make Lee Cronin’s The Mummy look worse in every shot, essentially recreating fog effects that fail to achieve any desired goal.

I would be lying if I said there was nothing fun in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. While the movie is certainly borrowing from a plethora of other horror movies (including The Exorcist, The Omen, and Don’t Look Now), it also features some genuinely shocking moments. There is a kill halfway through the movie that is undeniably one of the most deranged things in a studio movie in years. Few moments in studio horror films feel genuinely unlike anything you’ve ever seen before, and Lee Cronin delivers that several times in his monster flick.

There is a cruelty that Cronin deploys that becomes a double-edged sword. For some characters, it becomes a horrific way of exploring the themes of the movie into profanity-laden comedic beats. At the same time, there is a troubling current of anti-Egyptian storytelling. A literal priestess adopts the visual iconography of the Evil Queen from Snow White to capture an “innocent” white girl and forever transform her. Furthermore, Cronin does little to engage with Egyptian culture. This exacerbates existing negative views of Middle-Eastern cultures in a moment when this feels particularly problematic. Yet even without the recent conflict in the region, this would still harken back to questionable depictions of Egyptian locals.

Perhaps most frustrating of all is how intricate the drama is at the heart of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. There are few things more devastating to a marriage than the death of a child. Hatred, resentment, and paranoia spring from these divides. Cronin explicitly names the ghoul that hangs over the marriage, which deadens some of the impact. Even so, Reynor and Costa land the emotional weight of the film. This is another casualty of the massive runtime, as the end of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is obvious from the start. It just takes us forever to get to its final resting place.

Is Lee Cronin’s The Mummy worth watching?

No, sadly, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy can never rise above mediocrity. It is too long, too bloated, and features questionable portrayals of Egyptian life. While Reynor and Costa do everything they can to keep things on rails, Cronin lets his movie get away from him. If he were more ambitious in his storytelling, not only in terms of scale but form, there could have been a version of The Mummy that worked. Sadly, this feels like a dud and one that is not going to leave much of an impression.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is now in theaters.