Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Should Have Stayed Buried

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy

★

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is not the Brendan Fraser action-adventure mummy film many were expecting when the project was first announced. It attempts to create a darker, scarier monster film than the entries that preceded it. While it succeeds at delving into the darker corners of the monster mythology, it ultimately settles for gross-out horror, blood and gore. It offers little else, and the characters’ motivations are as shallow as the plot is illogical.

Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) is a journalist living in Cairo, Egypt, on assignment with his wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), a nurse; daughter Katie (Natalie Grace); and son Sebastián (Shylo Molina). Both kids are elementary school age. They bicker like siblings do, yet still seem to care for each other. It may be the singular thing this film gets right.

Laia Costa as Larissa Cannon and Jack Reynor as Charlie Cannon
© 2026 Warner Bros. Pictures

When Larissa heads to work, Charlie is watching the kids and discovers a stash of empty candy wrappers in Katie’s room. While he discovers the stash, Katie is being lured to the property fence by a woman known as The Magician (Hayat Kamille). Katie is abducted as Charlie conveniently pieces together weeks of grooming, chases after The Magician and Katie, and loses them in a massive sandstorm.

Eight years later, Katie is still missing and the Cannons are living stateside with their eight-year-old daughter Maud (Billie Roy) and now-teenage Sebastián. As a family, they carry the pain of Katie’s abduction quietly, doing all they can to keep some thread of normalcy.

Jack Reynor as Charlie Cannon
© 2026 Warner Bros. Pictures

A plane crashes in Egypt, near where Katie went missing, and an ancient sarcophagus lands unscathed just feet away from the wreckage. Inside are mummified human remains, which scientists take to a lab to unwrap. The mummy is Katie, and to the scientists’ surprise, she comes to life.

The Cannons travel back to Egypt, where Katie waits in a hospital room. The doctor, in his bad-horror-movie wisdom, tells Charlie and Larissa that the best thing for Katie is to go home, because familiarity and love will be the most likely things to bring her back fully.

Natalie Grace as Katie Cannon and Laia Costa as Larissa Cannon
© 2026 Warner Bros. Pictures

Keep in mind, Katie still looks like she’s just been unmummified, can’t speak and has little control of her limbs. She’s all but catatonic. But yes, let’s send her home to parents who have no idea how to care for someone in such a physical condition and with obvious severe psychological trauma.

The horror begins when Katie gets home, and we learn she’s capable of extreme evil despite her physical and mental limitations. Charlie, in one of the film’s more coherent moments, tells Larissa they need professional help with Katie. Larissa shuts Charlie down, refusing to let Katie out of their sight.

It’s here that I mentally checked out, realizing that all the film would offer is a blood-and-guts fest filled with disembowelments and monster vomit.

Investigating the Tomb
© 2026 Warner Bros. Pictures

Who is Lee Cronin and why does he get his name in the title? He’s a writer and director of critically acclaimed but little-known horror films. His most commercial project was 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, another gore fest that at least managed to serve up sympathetic characters we cared enough about not to want to see their insides paint the walls.

Here, the only substance is the gross-out horror. Sure, there’s a story woven in here, but it’s pretty standard monster-in-the-house fare. The characters have the faint outline of real people, and the actors, to their credit, do their damndest to make something out of the story. But they’re never able to get past the paper-thin plot and one-dimensional way their characters are written.

The actors get an “A” for effort; the film gets a fail for execution—on every conceivable level. If movies were still projected from film as it unspooled from platter to projector, this is one that should remain in the cans it came in.