‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ review: Maybe we’re the curse

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is poorly shot and nonsensically written. It wouldn’t make a difference if it weren’t.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is yet another reboot of the 94-year-old Mummy franchise. Specifically, it’s the FOURTH reboot and the 20TH film in the series. That’s a lot, even for something that’s part of the notoriously complicated Universal Monsters series. Even more complicated is the film’s release, with this coming less than six months after the announcement of an entirely unconnected 21st Mummy film.

Eight years ago, Charlie and Larissa Cannon (Jack Reynor and Laia Costa) lost their daughter Katie (Natalie Grace) due to a kidnapping while the family was living in Cairo. But their daughter has now been found, alive but catatonic. The Cannon’s bring Katie to their current home in New Mexico, reuniting her with her brother (Shylo Molina) and grandmother (Veronica Falcón), and introducing her to the younger sister (Billie Roy) she never had the chance to meet.

Larissa is focused on her daughter’s recovery. Charlie is desperate to know what happened to her in the eight years she was missing, partnering with an archaeologist (Mark Mitchinson) and the detective (May Calamawy) who worked the original case in his search for truth. Both parents are too distracted in their mission to notice the truth: something else came back with Katie. And the cost of their daughter’s return only increases as they stumble closer to the horrible truth of what happened when she was away.

Buried from the start.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is notably the first Universal Monsters title in decades to not seriously involve Universal Pictures, with Warner Bros. taking up theatrical distribution. That’s not exactly unprecedented (Warner Bros. previously handled American distribution for the Hammer era of Universal Monsters flicks) but the reasoning behind it is significant. When Alex Kurtzman’s The Mummy failed to launch the Dark Universe Marvel-adjacent franchise that Universal had sunk millions into, indie horror titan Blumhouse was given license to do its own series of standalone Universal Monsters films. The first film, Leigh Whannel’s The Invisible Man, found massive critical and commercial success. The second, Leigh Whannel’s Wolf Man, performed so poorly that producer Jason Blum openly bemoaned its failure on Twitter,

This one flop was enough to get Universal to abandon the Blumhouse films entirely, instead throwing themselves at the mercy of nostalgia and just bringing back Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz for another sequel to Stephen Sommers’s The Mummy. The problem? Blumhouse was already well into Lee Cronin’s The Mummy when this decision was made. Which makes this film a inconvenience at best and direct competition to Universal’s shiny old toy at worst. One must at least give credit to someone somewhere that this didn’t end up a tax write-off. But it’s clearly being undermined both at the studio level and by general moviegoers simply for not being connected to the incarnation of The Mummy millennials feels the most nostalgia for.

A fate worse than death.

That’s not to say this film is good. To be clear, it is not. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is an absolute disaster. The script underserves what would otherwise be decent performances by Reynor, Costa, Molina, and Roy. And Calamawy, Grace, and Falcón are only given brief opportunities to demonstrate their talent. The baffling 135-minute runtime makes this the longest Mummy entry to date. It is literally as long (or longer) than any two of the original Universal sequels combined. This should have been more than enough time to fix basic characterization issues. Instead, the film walks itself in circles and picks up and abandons subplots and supporting characters while its story and heroes crumble.

The primary setting is a house that’s big and stupid enough for the entire Cannon family to be home without anyone ever noticing the supernatural nonsense someone else is going through in the next room. This is the sort of thing audiences are often expected to gloss over for a scene or two. But after two hours it only serves to make the film seem all the more ridiculous and undermine the believability and likability of the characters.

This is gorier than the other Mummy titles (though not by much) and some of the associated special effects are impressive. But there’s even more visual effects that land somewhere between dreadful and underwhelming. Dave Garbett’s cinematography doesn’t help. An extensive number of shots are distorted and smeared for no discernible reason. And the movie throws in split diopter shots like a ten-year-old throws back candy the day after Halloween, to the point where it starts to feel like some sort of drinking game or absurdist meme.

The bottom line.

Yes, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy stinks. But it deserves to succeed or fail on its own merits, not the whims of our nostalgia. In my ongoing conversations about The Mummy franchise in the last few weeks (I’m very fun at parties), the bulk of the hostility I’ve seen directed toward the film that has nothing to do with the film itself. I’ve heard it called a cash grab. It’s one of the lowest budgeted films in the series and easily the one least concerned with mainstream tastes. I have heard it claimed the film doesn’t have a mummy. It clearly does. I have heard it said it won’t work because the mummy isn’t Imhotep. Imhotep has appeared in exactly three of the franchise’s twenty films. I’ve talked to several people who are mad about the franchise being rebooted yet don’t realize that the Fraser trilogy was a reboot.

Even industry press participated. Producer James Wan running to the bathroom was turned into reports he had stormed out of a screening. The extremely common practice of production titles was used to fuel rumors that the film’s title was being changed to distance it from the franchise. Critics and audiences will bemoan films for not being original, yet we’re immediately ready to attack a film that attempts to attempts to stray too far from established nostalgia. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is trying to do something new and interesting with a series that is almost a century old. Yet it was immediately met with skepticism and disdain for attempting the originality we’re constantly crying out for.

At least it’s a bad movie. Because if this were fantastic, it still would have failed. And that would have been on us.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is in theaters now. Watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of Patrick Redmond and Warner Bros. Pictures. Read more reviews by Brogan Luke Bouwhuis here.