Lee Cronin’s The Mummy review – rotten to the core

It makes total sense that filmmaker Lee Cronin was shuffled the keys to the big house following the critical and commercial success of his 2023 franchise remix, Evil Dead Rise. It’s sad to report, then, that his shot at a Cronin-coded blockbuster horror is as awkward as the clunky prefix on its title, as he attempts to fuse squibs, splatter and hardcore gore onto a hackneyed story that defies both internal and external logic. As with his previous film, the combustible nature of the family unit is Cronin’s theme in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, as the Cannon clan (who, circumstances pending, are certainly no blast) hit choppy waters while on professional secondment in Aswan, Egypt. But its exploration of those dynamics is massively diluted within a bigger, longer and more unwieldy film.

Lantern-jawed patriarch Charlie (Jack Reynor) is a TV news reporter covering North Africa looking to score a gig in New York. While his pregnant wife Larissa (Laia Costa), a nurse, is on a shift, their eldest daughter Katie is groomed and nabbed by a ​“secret friend” at the bottom of the garden and spirited into a sudden sandstorm. The woeful missing persons bureau are less-than-no help, and so the Cannons return to the US one daughter less… until she randomly turns up eight years later in a strange sarcophagus that has been located, unscathed, at an air crash site. Katie’s back! Only, the person that the Egyptian authorities deem to be completely fine and just in need of some TLC is actually non-verbal, chows on insects, looks like she’s been repeatedly run over by an articulated lorry and is prone to bouts of splenetic violence. What could go wrong?

To loop back briefly to the film’s title, there are maybe two misnomers there. First it’s worth addressing the second part, as while it’s called The Mummy, the link to mummies and the mythos behind this ancient and innovative embalming process is superficial at best. It does not feel in any way as if this was made as a Mummy movie, as it more closely resembles a tried-and-tested kid possession horror in the vein of The Exorcist. It just about gets by on a set of technicalities, but anyone who turns out hoping for a deep dive into the lore and logistics of mummification are going to be sorely disappointed.

And we’re told that it’s a Lee Cronin film, but is it really? With his short but sweet track record he’s demonstrated a talent for excessive and creative gore effects, but those moments have always been anchored in an emotionally coherent backdrop. With this film, we get little hints of the Cronin of yore, but there’s also so much dire exposition and necessary genre static in the background that his imprint is less discernible (and enjoyable) than you’d hope it would be. There are glimmers of the old magic: a frantic set piece; OTT split-diopter and rack-focus shots; some latex scrunge ; a snatch of emotional repartee between characters who are desperately trying to comprehend the situation they are in. But missing is a very basic sense of where the characters are in the story and how they interact with one another. Costa goes MIA for a lengthy stretch in the middle of the film, and you’re left to wonder, why is she not here to witness all this carnage?

A parallel story depicts May Calamawy as a lone Egyptian detective going to dangerous lengths to offer the Cannons some closure on their strange circumstance. The depiction of Egypt seems to have been gleaned from ​’90s Disney cartoons, with its sweaty corrupt cops, cackling tattooed hags, bustling street bazaars and, apparently, families still using VHS deep into the 2010s. This rejection of basic authenticity just makes it extremely hard to care what happens to these characters, and it’s a film that ends up going through the spooky motions, albeit with sound effects turned up to eleven.