‘The Mummy’ Review: Gonzo and Grotesque but Never Painful

Lee Cronin, the madman behind Evil Dead Rise, is a filmmaker who has proven he knows how to deliver brutal, crowd-pleasing horror that lands much like punch to the face. With his latest effort, The Mummy, he seems to be reaching for heavier, further heightened stakes. The film attempts to build an emotional spine strong enough to make its brutality really string, and not just shock, by centering the ghoulish story on a young girl and her grieving, all-American nuclear family. But that never lands. While the same gonzo nastiness that worked so well in Evil Dead bleeds through, that violence registers as simply gross rather than actually painful without any characters to actually care about.

The director recently went on the record saying that while he was offered the chance to direct the upcoming Evil Dead Burn, he turned it down in favour of tackling The Mummy, which he described as the riskier of the two projects. There’s some truth to that. Blumhouse’s take on the Universal Monsters catalogue is not exactly burning hot in the horror zeitgeist the way Evil Dead is, espeiclly after the lukewarm response to last year’s Wolf Man.

Cronin, of course, is the reason Evil Dead feels newly vital once again. His Evil Dead Rise, released in 2023, arrived ten years after the previous entry, and was never even intended for a theatrical release. It got one anyway, and the franchise hasn’t been this alive since the late 80s, with two new chapters on the immediate horizon. Thank you, Lee.

That context hangs heavily over . Cronin’s latest struggles to exist outside the shadow of the modern trilogy, and its toolbox feels inseparable from the tonal insanity of that franchise. As a fan of those films, and of Cronin’s reinvention in particular, it’s surprising to see that same brutality land so awkwardly here. The core issue is tonal. Watching a young girl mutilated for the majority of the film runs in direct opposition to the gonzo insanity this style of horror usually thrives on. There’s nothing inherently off-limits about putting children in the line of fire. If anything, it’s anti-Hollywood, anti-patriarchal, even a little punk rock. But here, it simply isn’t fun. Nor is it a bummer. It’s just not all that engaging.