Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (2026)
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy | Wrap It Up
Written by Cody Wagner: 5/16/2026
The Mummy, specifically, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, aka “This is Not Brenden Fraser’s The Mummy”, is a new take on the franchise that started all the way back to the 1930’s with Boris Karloff. This time in the director’s chair is Evil Dead Rise’s own Lee Cronin. It was a nice touch to have his name in the title, but it may be a little presumptuous to know a director’s name off of the one big movie under their belt. That likely came from wanting to avoid any confusion of the previously mentioned series with Brenden Fraser, or to avoid the stink off of Tom Cruise’s soggy attempt at launching a new franchise. You kids like that Dark Universe? No? Neither did anyone.
This review will be spoiler-free in case you wanted to check it out. Here we have a clean slate with a self-contained Mummy movie. It centers around a family in Cairo whose daughter is abducted by a mysterious woman who has her reasons for abducting a child. This is already sort of flawed as there’s this quasi-mystery of “What Happened to Katie?”
She was abducted and presumably turned into a mummy… I just saw it in the first ten minutes of this movie!
The first quarter of this movie plays out like a procedural mystery movie as a police officer tries to track down Katie and the woman who kidnapped her. Yet, there’s no air of mystery as the story unravels because we already saw who did it and why they did it in the first ten minutes.
There are just flaws in this that bugged me enough that I was unable to relax and let a horror movie be a horror movie. Natalie Grace as Katie and Verónica Falcón as the grandmother put on excellent performances. Everyone here just did an okay job with their characters. Everyone except Jack Reynor. He plays the dad and unfortunately sticks out like a sore thumb. He played that asshole boyfriend in Midsommar, and I thought he was excellent there. In Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, his performance just comes off as disinterested. He did a fantastic job looking uninterested and almost clueless throughout Midsommar, but turns out that’s just his face. Either that, or Cronin’s direction certainly did him a disservice because I felt zero urgency in his performance. It was almost as if finding his daughter wasn’t his priority.
Another problem I had was that this movie is just way too long. This movie just doesn’t justify a runtime of two hours and fourteen minutes. There’s a reason a lot of horror movies are at a lean, tightly-written ninety minutes: You have your concept, introduce those characters, develop or kill ‘em, resolve the horror, and you get out before you overstay your welcome.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy certainly overstays its welcome.
There are some positives to this movie, however. Like I said before, this entire movie rests on Natalie Grace’s performance and she nailed it. She’s abysmally catatonic when they find her and see her at the hospital, and creepy for the rest of the movie when she wakes up. That’s fantastic for a horror movie if the monster is at least interesting.
Along with her the production crew, specifically the makeup department, are really putting their hearts into this thing. This movie is gory and disgusting which is gonna work for some, but not for others. It worked for me as there are many scenes that I’ll be sure to cringe about far past the time I saw it.
One last thing I’ll say about The Mummy is that … It barely feels like a Mummy movie. I’ve heard from friends that it feels like an Evil Dead movie with a Mummy skin, but I would have to disagree. However, it feels EXACTLY like an Exorcist movie: A little girl gets possessed by an ancient evil, parent(s) have a hard time coping, and very distinct plot points I can’t go into without getting into spoilers. It’s like a better version of Exorcist: Believer, if that's any sort of compliment.
I can’t tell you why this movie stuck in my craw as badly as it did, because even though the movie isn’t terrible I left incredibly disappointed. Perhaps it’s because I know Lee Cronin can deliver on a great horror movie, but this movie was a misstep for him. With Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, I think I’ll only resurrect this one to check out the gory parts on YouTube when the need presents itself. ‘Til that moment, I think this one ought to stay buried.
Rating: 2/5
The movie plays out like a procedural mystery movie as a police officer tries to track down Katie and the woman who kidnapped her. Yet, there’s no air of mystery since we already saw who did it and why … in the first ten minutes.
Film: Lee Cronin’s The Mummy
Director: Lee Cronin
Writer: Lee Cronin
Release Year: 2026