Red Letter Media's Half in the Bag's Blumhouse's Lee Cronin's The Mummy Review

TL;DR

Red Letter Media reviews Lee Cronin's The Mummy, finding it a dim, derivative horror film that borrows from The Exorcist and Evil Dead rather than delivering anything mummy-related.

Key Points

• 1.The movie has almost nothing to do with mummies. Mike and Jay agree the title is misleading — the film is essentially Lucio Fulci's The Exorcist for two acts, then becomes the same Evil Dead movie Lee Cronin already made.
• 2.The lead actor from Midsommar delivers a bland, wooden performance. His lack of character arc undermines the ending, which mirrors The Exorcist's sacrifice climax — a payoff that requires a flawed father's redemption but never earns it.
• 3.The film suffers from modern cinematography's dim, murky color grading. Mike compares it unfavorably to last year's The Wolf Man, noting filmmakers crush dynamic range so much that highlights and shadows become indistinguishable.
• 4.The plot over-explains itself immediately, then repeats the same information. The mummy's mythology — an ancient demon locked away for 82 generations by one Egyptian bloodline — is fully revealed in the opening, killing all mystery for the rest of the film.
• 5.The title 'Lee Cronin's The Mummy' exists to differentiate it from a planned Brendan Fraser Mummy reboot. The naming mirrors the 'Lee Daniels' The Butler' situation, where rights to a 1952 film called The Butler forced a director credit into the title.
• 6.The movie is a Blumhouse production that confines 90% of its action to one house. This constraint makes logical story choices — like hospitalizing the mummy-possessed daughter or holding the wake elsewhere — impossible, exposing plot absurdities like an implausibly cavernous wall cavity.
• 7.The film's horror shorthand relies on gross aesthetics over genuine dread. Old VHS tapes, Apple IIe computers, cobweb-filled Egyptian hospitals, and mold-covered walls are used as cheap creepiness signals despite the clearly modern setting.
• 8.The funeral/wake scene is where the film fully derails. Grandma is defenestrated onto a car hood and eaten by wolves, the youngest daughter rips out her own teeth to install grandma's false teeth, and the demon spreads to infect the whole family — a cheap excuse to multiply Evil Dead-style monsters.
• 9.Universal's monster reboots keep failing because the creatures lack inherent cinematic threat. Mike and Jay trace a pattern from the 2017 Tom Cruise Mummy (which killed the 'Dark Universe') through the 2025 Wolf Man, arguing mummies especially are too fragile and require so much added mythology they stop being interesting.