Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is another reimagining that should’ve stayed buried. This version is either too dull, too gory, or too nonsensical to enjoy. Plus, haven’t some of these monsters been done to death already?
As the movie opens in Egypt, a TV reporter (Jack Reynor) and his wife (Laia Costa) discover their daughter has disappeared at the hands of an evil and mysterious sorceress (Hayat Kamille). The wife is pregnant with their third child after the daughter and son, and now eight years later, the daughter has been found.
The daughter does indeed return to them, but not as they remember. At first she’s in a catatonic state, but eventually she displays erratic and disturbing behavior and facial expressions that would look right at home in The Exorcist.
The reporter father tries to get help from everyone from an archeologist to a female detective, after the daughter’s reemergence. These characters either receive far too much or far too little screen time and their impact is not effective.
When the daughter goes haywire with her Egyptian curse, the movie turns into an unmitigated gorefest. Some scenes offer unintentional comedy, as in a funeral sequence, but others are just plain unclean without any merit or imagination.
Lee Cronin’s structure for his version of The Mummy offers either too little or too much, and it’s sadly misguided in its execution. For every scene with obligatory exposition like something out of a crime drama TV show, there are a number of scenes with the aforementioned gore factor. Cronin sadly can’t do justice to these scenes, either due to lackadaisical effort or over-the-top carnage.
The movie also features an ending that doesn’t seem to know when it should end. It was as if Cronin didn’t have any faith in the structure and just threw everything he had at the screen and saw what he thought would stick. The ending is like a singer who doesn’t know when they’ve reached the end of their number.
Had it not been for the unintentional comedy in some scenes, this would be the worst film I’ve seen so far this year. As it is, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy will probably lie under the sand until the worst of 2026 is unearthed.
Grade: C-
(Rated R for strong, disturbing, violent content, gore, language, and brief drug use.)
Reviewer’s Note: I saw this movie at the Historic Strand in Jesup.
