It’s an odd time to be a Mummy movie that doesn’t star Brendan Fraser. When the next movie in that much-loved ‘90s series was recently announced, it couldn’t help but overshadow the latest Blumhouse-Atomic Monster classic Universal Monster reboot. Even Blumhouse made a joke about any perceived confusion on social media.
But Lee Cronin’s The Mummy needn’t worry about being mistaken for Fraser’s series. Instead, its more pressing concern is how much it borrows from other horror movies, especially The Exorcist—a movie that’s already been ripped off hundreds of times. The Mummy’s DNA also includes influences from producer James Wan’s massive output, especially The Conjuring universe, with even a little bit of M3GAN thrown in for good measure.
It starts off intriguingly enough. Outside of Cairo, we meet an Egyptian family with a supernatural secret buried beneath their farm. We also meet an American family who’ve relocated so that the dad, Charlie (Midsommar’s Jack Reynor), can further his journalism career. On an otherwise ordinary day, young Katie (Emily Mitchell) vanishes from the backyard; though the audience knows who’s taken her, Charlie and his wife Larissa (The Wheel of Time’s Laia Costa) are as mystified as they are frantic and grief-stricken.
Eight years later, the story picks back up with Katie still missing, despite the efforts of Zaki, a sympathetic Egyptian detective played by Moon Knight’s May Calamawy. Charlie and Larissa, along with son Seb (Shylo Molina) and daughter Maud (Billie Roy), are in Albuquerque living with Larissa’s mother, Carmen (Ozark’s Verónica Falcón), stubbornly clinging to hope that Katie may yet be found.
Of course, when she suddenly turns up alive (she’s played as a teen by Natalie Grace), withered and seemingly catatonic, the reunion is not what they’d pictured it would be. The main mystery driving Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is figuring out why Katie was snatched and then imprisoned in a 3,000-year-old sarcophagus. That’s, of course, tied into the reasons for her very strange behavior, which involves scampering between the walls, eating scorpions, projectile puking, and lashing out at her family in increasingly repulsive ways.
Centering a teenage girl in a Mummy movie is a novel choice for the genre. Unfortunately, Cronin’s story doesn’t really take advantage of its unique angle, instead tracing a possession narrative that feels entirely too familiar. There’s some mythology about a demon that aims to destroy families slathered on top—as if we couldn’t already tell this is not a happy home. There’s some interesting tension between Charlie and Larissa as they bicker over how to approach Katie’s care, but that soon falls away as they become enveloped in evil chaos.
Cronin, who delivered a fun, splattery franchise expansion with 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, strives to keep the energy up throughout, but The Mummy runs over two hours and starts to feel it. It has a handful of wonderfully gory moments—including a cringe-inducing pedicure scene and an operatically macabre wake—that make you wish he’d cut loose even more rather than resorting to the same old “spooky kid levitating with a spooky voice” tropes. (Nothing here touches the cheese grater in Evil Dead Rise, in other words.)
The Mummy also insists on explaining everything; cue the scene where a character visits a college professor who can effortlessly translate a long-dead language. Cue another scene where a villain has literally left behind a record of exactly what they did and why they did it, in case any audience member failed to connect the dots on their own.
On a more positive note, this may be the first Mummy movie that strenuously avoids “othering” Egyptian culture. Zaki, the tough character played by the Egyptian-Palestinian Calamawy, is crucially important, and you almost wish Cronin had centered the story even more on her, especially given Zaki’s outspoken perspective on her country’s ancient history and the artifacts associated with it.
And, thankfully, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a vast improvement over Tom Cruise’s The Mummy. (Most movies are.) But it’s also so forgettable that nobody will be talking about it by the time Brendan Fraser’s next Mummy arrives.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy opens in theaters April 17.
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