The opportunity to do a mummy movie that was a truly terrifying experience was what Lee Cronin says attracted him to the project, and now, hitting the 2026 movie release calendar, we’ve got the finished product in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. This iteration centers around a girl, Katie, who has been found alive(?) eight years after being abducted. First reactions had moviegoers dropping a lot of F-bombs, so let’s see if critics can expound on those a little now that they’ve had time to process.
Natalie Grace portrays the so-called monster in this iteration, but in addition to wondering if this even counts as a mummy movie, most critics seem to agree that at over two hours, the movie’s just simply too long. In his review of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, Guy Lodge of Variety says there’s “no earthly (or unearthly) reason” for the upcoming horror movie to have a 133-minute runtime. Lodge writes:
Cronin has a fine, lurid sense of humor, and sure enough, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy frequently trades in the kind of carnage that inspires as much shrieking hilarity as terror in an amped-up crowd. Gradually stripped of their composure and, in some cases, their skin, the actors all play it with straight-faced commitment. … The film rattles enough skeletons, both on screen and in the audience, to ensure that Cronin’s name will be remembered by genre heads with or without the titular reminder. Still, it wouldn’t have had any less visceral impact with a tighter trim. Shave off 40 minutes, as bloodily as you like, and there’d still be enough guts to go round.
Siddhant Adlakha of IGN rates it a “Good” 7 out of 10, writing that Lee Cronin’s The Mummy will be “one of the saddest, funniest, messiest, and above all, meanest horror flicks” you see this year. It’s so ugly that movie fans’ mileage for such horrors may vary, but genre fans are likely in for a decent ride. Adlakha says:
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It’s oddly refreshing, in the landscape of ‘elevated’ horror, to witness a film where trauma is more than just a metaphor hovering in the distance, but rather, a central enigma that erodes a family from within. The real tragedy of The Mummy isn’t just that Katie can’t put words to what was done to her, but that her parents haven’t the slightest conception of how to approach it. But of course, a quiet, considered film The Mummy is not, and it isn’t long before Cronin’s energetic stylizations begin transforming it into a discomfiting sensory experience.
Dan Jolin of Empire gives it 3 stars out of 5, saying the “domestic chills, body horror, paranormal scares and gore-drenched action” should keep horror hounds happy, even as sticklers will likely agree this isn’t really a mummy movie. Jolin continues:
So this ‘Mummy’ is no reanimated ancient priest stalking ruins and museums like Christopher Lee or Arnold Vosloo. This is an apparently vulnerable young woman requiring around-the-clock home-care from her traumatised and increasingly fractious loved ones, who ultimately suffer from monstrous domestic antics that feel closer to The Exorcist than anything involving bandaged stalkers. Add in some queasily effective body-horror scenes (the nail-cutting sequence is a nasty doozy), and this makes for some uncomfortable viewing that might not be to everyone’s taste.
David Ehrlich of IndieWire grades the film a C-, writing that anyone who wants to see “a possessed child peel semi-congealed strips of rotten flesh off their leg” will have a blast at Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. But that may be it, Ehrlich says:
This dull and labored attempt at reviving one of the movies’ oldest monsters is too derivative where it counts. Its characters are thin, its setpieces and sick delights are nakedly borrowed from much better films, and its titular evil has never been less threatening. I don’t have any particular brand loyalty to the ancient likes of Imhotep and Ahmanet (remember her?), but, to his credit, Lee Cronin has inspired my first strong opinion about the mummy: It shouldn’t be an eight-year-old girl named Katie.
Johnny Oleksinski of the NY Post rates it 1.5 out of 4 stars, agreeing with other critics that it feels more like The Exorcist than a mummy movie and is both “diabolically long and determinedly uninteresting.” Lee Cronin’s effort made this critic yearn for the days of Dwayne Johnson’s rocky acting in The Scorpion King, and he found himself wishing Brendan Fraser would heroically swing in to save the day. Oleksinski writes:
The titular terror’s repetitive and nauseating pastimes include scurrying around like a centipede, banging on the walls a bunch and grossing out critics. Unfortunately Katie is at her scariest on the movie’s poster. On-screen, she never rises above weird. And all the body-horror yuckiness is similar to Evil Dead Rise only way less fun and more than half an hour longer. The film goes on and on and on. The Great Pyramid took less time to build. You start to feel like you’re the one who’s been trapped inside a sarcophagus for eight years.
While the critics seem to agree the mummy movie — if you can even call it that — doesn’t need to be over two hours, not all of the reviews are bad. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy has a 53% Rotten Tomatoes score as of this writing, so if you decide this sounds like an experience you need to see for yourself, you can catch the movie in theaters starting Friday, April 17.