The Mummy Review – Classic Monster Excavated to Uncover Resurrection Mystery | Horror movies

WArner Bros likes to refer to its tough new take on The Mummy as Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, a bafflingly grandiose assertion that has drawn some well-deserved ridicule online over the past few weeks. That’s partly because it’s separated from Universal’s upcoming return to the ’90s and ’00s franchise (Blumhouse, the successful horror filmmaker behind the film, posted on It’s also an attempt to capitalize on our pop auteurs’ moment, one that Warners helped create with Ryan Coogler and Zach Cregger front and center in the ad campaigns for their hit films last year (the clip for The Mummy refers to it as “from the studio that brought you the guns” as if that meant all of that).

While it’s refreshing to see the studio’s focus on pushing the director rather than the actor (the last attempt at Mummy relied on Tom Cruise’s star power, a decision that didn’t stop the film from losing a significant amount of money), it also speaks to unearned indulgence and the hasty coronation of genius before one has really had a chance to prove oneself (a loss-of-the-moment trend we need to move away from and one that, to his credit, Cronin wasn’t sure he was a part of). Cronin, an Irish filmmaker who has only made two films to date (The Hole in the Ground and Evil Dead Rise), has undeniable visual talent, but his mummy also feels silly, drags on too long (134 minutes is an unacceptable length for such a thin film), unsure of tone, and just not all that scary. It is also, for something so clearly attributed to just one person, a film heavily influenced by the work of many, many others. It may not look like a Mummy movie you’ve seen before, but it will look like something else great.

After Tom Cruise’s The Mummy decimated the doomed Dark Universe, Universal tried to find smaller, smarter, and, most importantly, cheaper ways to use its classic monsters. Lee Whannell’s The Invisible Man became a homegrown thriller who sleeps with the enemy, Nicolas Cage’s Renfield turned Dracula’s side character into a high-concept comedy lead, Abigail turned a crime thriller into a horror comedy with the kidnapping of Dracula’s daughter, and The Wolf Man went one spot with its ill-advised commentary on toxic masculinity. Cronin’s The Mummy is a much grander—and, one might imagine, more expensive—show, but it’s a similar attempt to avoid the obvious. It’s a familiar horror game for kids in the vein of The Exorcist, The Omen, Orphan or Cronin’s debut, The Hole in the Ground, but wrapped up a little differently…

The terrifying child is Katie, who disappeared in Cairo eight years ago and was found in the wreckage of a plane crash, kept inside an ornate coffin, a suspected victim of human trafficking. Her estranged parents (Jack Reynor and Laia Costa, doing their best with scraps), who have since moved to New Mexico with their two young children, bring her home but are warned that she suffers from locked-in syndrome and it will take time to get her out. However, for all the horror involved in Katie’s disappearance, taken on by a malicious local woman who uses her daughter to “supply” her with candy, her return is ruined by some rather rubbery prosthetics, as if a Halloween character in the park has suddenly come to life (her parents wondering if she’s okay becomes increasingly laughable). As her teeth begin to crumble and her skin begins to tear, one begins to wonder if Cronin has made a casual follow-up to Evil Dead, especially since he throws every ounce of flesh at the wall in a loud, exhausting finale.

But it doesn’t have Sam Raimi’s wicked sense of humor, and the film is taken a little too seriously (the extended length also allows for a serious detective investigation from another film set in Egypt, convincingly led by May Callemawy) so when the final act’s moments of goofiness come (when the two daughters imitate Linda Blair’s filthy mouth of Regan and the funeral turns into a full-fledged film) they feel like strangely dissonant flashes. Much of the film revolves around a question posed by the tagline – What happened to Katie? – but the answer is quite literally just the title (it became Lee Cronin’s “The Mummy”) and so any hope that this length and this grandeur will lead somewhere surprising or substantive is quickly dashed. As in Evil Dead Rise, Cronin ultimately seems more interested in the murky gore of it all, of which there’s plenty, but again it’s mostly too weirdly unrealistic to really penetrate (although he does get credit for the inventive use of a scorpion and some torn vocal cords). There’s less attention to character, suspense or logic, and much of the unfolding chaos takes place in a world where rational questions – didn’t anyone hear that, didn’t they ask that, why would they do that – are easily ignored.

I appreciate Cronin’s bold, IMAX-scale ambition, mummy feel and epic sound much more than standard Blumhouse horror films, harking back to a time when studios treated monster movies like high-quality blockbusters, and his film is often quite stunning to look at. but feel Having an actual movie isn’t enough to compete with the excitement of all the other parts that also fall into place, and again, the one thing the horror director couldn’t conjure up was a good, terrifying script.