The reviews are in for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, and so far audiences disagree with the critics. The latest film in The Mummy franchise is directed and written by Cronin, who is best known for 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, and is meant to be a modern supernatural take on the familiar bandage-wrapped undead, particularly when compared to the popular Brandon Fraser-led action flicks that began in the late ’90s. Box office predictions for this horror reinterpretation of The Mummy have steadily increased as horror fans have gained interest in the Blumhouse Productions and Atomic Monster project. However, critics are mixed on Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, while viewers have generally enjoyed the film for the scares.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is getting mixed reviews but audiences are enjoying the horror
As of April 17, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy has a less than stellar 52% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes based on 89 reviews, which is seven points lower than it was yesterday, but a fairly high 77% audience score based on over 100 verified ratings. Meanwhile on Metacritic, the average critics score is even lower at a 47 based on 24 reviews.
Looking through what the critics have to say, some find that the film struggles to balance its supernatural mystery story with the bloody body-horror scenes. The movie follows journalist Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) and his wife Larissa (Laia Costa) as they lose their daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) in Cairo. However, eight years later the Cannon family receives a phone call that her daughter has been found in a sarcophagus and is actually alive, though something certainly seems wrong with her and Egyptian detective (May Calamawy) attempts to figure out what happened to her during her disappearance.
Critics say that the plot attempts to lean into the mystery, but that the latter half of the film drop this in favor of the familiar horror tropes of jump-scares and gorefests with a creepy-girl villain. Aidan Kelley for Collider writes that “the movie seems particularly obsessed with ripping off key plot points an aesthetics from The Exorcist movies in an almost flagrant sense.” In fact, he’s not the only reviewer to reference the 1973 classic, with Belen Edwards saying in Mashable that Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is “frustratingly formulaic” and “draws heavily on creepy child tropes, including some Exorcist-level backbends and cursing, twisting them slightly to incorporate some mummy lore.”
Meanwhile, Mark Kennedy writing for the Associated Press notes that the film builds an air of suspense before abandoning it completely. He writes, “Cronin leans into all the horror cliches — storms, dollhouses, flickering lights, muttered spells, whacked-out cults, bathtubs filled with rotting water, skittering insects and random coyotes — to establish a staid and eerie foundation, only to go over-the-top gorefest at the end.” Many thought that the Cronin was trying to turn Evil Dead Rising into his version of The Mummy instead of finding more inspiration with the source material.
That said, audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are generally more open to the film’s blend of ideas. One user who gives the film a 4 out of 5 believes that it is “a melting pot of a previous scary film’s techniques and elements” and “the best attempt at a horror/scary film in a while.” Another viewer found the film “awesomely unexpected,” believing it would “be standard Egyptian fare” but was “far closer to an Insidious or a Conjuring.” Other horror fans who gave high scores to Lee Cronin’s The Mummy were pleased that it genuinely frightened them.
This goes to show that there is a divide between what critics want and what the typical audience member is looking for in a horror film. Where critics might find jump-scares and gore to be cheap tricks, many fans don’t mind them so long as they are actually scared. They’re also willing to give a pass to a horror story that is full of genre clichés for the same reason. That’s partly why Scream 7, a similar horror-thriller released this year, received very low critics scores with a 30% on Rotten Tomatoes but a much higher 75% audience score.
