The Crow and all the images you see in this review are owned by Lionsgate
Directed by Rupert Sanders
It’s been almost twenty years since the last Crow movie, and about thirty years since the only one anybody cared about. The production history on this is as tortured and unkillable as Eric Draven himself, and yet the box office proved to be the one thing that could put it down for good, as this reboot tanked as hard as Borderlands did just a few weeks ago. Still, something like the Crow would also be niche outside its one moment of pop culture relevance, so very few people going to see it doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t hit for the right kind of audience. Was the decade of false-starts and production woes worth suffering through to finally get us here, or should this have stayed dead, buried, and plowed over with concrete? Let’s find out!!
Eric Draven (Bill Skarsgård) isn’t great at a lot of things, but he is a solid boyfriend to Shelly (FKA Twigs) who’s escaped from a bad situation and is looking for a fresh start. Sadly for the both of them, her past catches up to her and the two are murdered by the hired goons of Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston). With such a horrible fate befalling them, a mysterious strange in the place in between life and death (Sami Bouajila) offers Eric the chance to come back to life and get his revenge against the monsters that did this to him as well as save Shelly’s soul because Vincent has some sort of demon thing going on that sends people straight to Hell. With nothing else to live for, or die for I guess, Eric takes the offer and becomes an angel of vengeance and begins his quest for the soul of his dearly departed girlfriend. Does this new lease on undead life restore balance to a world that has been corrupted by dark forces? Why did Vincent go after Shelly in the first place, and will Eric like the answers he finds along the way? Will he fight with all the strength and speed of the mighty crow!?
2024 has been a surprisingly great year for movies, as the good films have only gotten better, and the bad ones have been few and far between, which makes it that much more tragic for this utterly banal and inert remake to finally see the light of day. They’ve been working on a new Crow movie for well over a decade with the likes of Bradley Cooper, Jason Momoa, and even Mark Wahlberg attached to play the lead, and what this feels like is a frustrated studio trying to throw something together in a spectacular display of the sunk cost fallacy. In a lesser year this might have skated by as a nondescript and easily forgettable remake to go alongside the likes of Total Recall and Clash of the Titans, but it feels especially galling In the year that brought us I Saw the TV Glow, that this is lacking in so much personality. Eric is mostly a blank slate as Bill Skarsgård seems lost trying to find a voice for the character, and while FKA Twigs is great at being the girlfriend you’d come back from the grave to avenge, there’s not much for her on the page that isn’t simplistic and cliché ridden. The villains, who were so iconic to the Brandon Lee film, have been collapsed into two characters with a bunch of nameless henchmen, and neither one of them bring enough hateable energy to their roles to make the revenge story as satisfying as it should be.
Perhaps it’s another sign of my generation being well out of step with the kids of today that one of our icons of rebellious youth culture feels so creaky and center of the dial, but I’ll give it at least a small amount of credit for making a few changes to the source material; not that those changes worked, per se, but that some shortcomings were recognized. The Crow is a violent power fantasy borne from the grief that James O’Barr felt after his fiancée was tragically killed by a drunk driver, and while he himself recognizes that the project was more self-destructive than therapeutic, what I’ve read of it is extremely compelling in its emotional rawness. It was well translated in the Brandon Lee film from 1994, but it’s reasonable to say that it was a product of its time and that kind of single-minded righteous revenge story could be uncomfortable in today’s world where many young men have picked up a gun fueled by the same sense of self-centered justice. To that end, the movie spends more time on Eric and Shelly before the tragic event occurs, and when he does get his powers it’s not shown in a particularly flattering light as he comes off as clumsy and short-sighted in his quest. This could have worked, but the script fails to use these ideas in any interesting way. Despite the extra time given to Eric and Shelly’s relationship, it doesn’t feel any more developed or less idyllic than the simple love story we got in the original movie. Some of it is the acting as Skarsgård isn’t adding much to what’s written in the script, but it’s a rather tall order to try and make anything work out of such simple material so I don’t fault him for not being able to carry this on his shoulders. The end result is that we end up in more or less the same place by the halfway point of this one that we did in the first ten minutes of the original, and then we’re stuck trying to fit an entire Crow movie into the last forty-five minutes which gives us no room to breathe and no opportunities to flesh out the world. We at least get one solid fight scene, but with so many great action films coming out these days it’s hard to get too excited about what they offer here.
The key to understanding the original film is that it’s ultimately a fairy tale that leaves a lot of its minutia up to the viewers’ imagination, and this is where the remake digs its own grave. The Crow is about feelings, artistry, soul-bearing vulnerability, and even a bit of violent machismo to round out the aesthetic. What it was not is lore, mechanics, and exposition, yet in the age of superhero movies and overly critical YouTubers, this feels the need to spend precious time telling us what’s going on instead of letting us feel what Eric is going through. Did it matter in the Brandon Lee film what entity gave Eric his powers, or even how his powers were supposed to function? Did someone need to dangle a Faustian bargain over his head to get him to take revenge, or was it enough that he wanted revenge for the cruel acts that befell him and his girlfriend? It’s also bafflingly narrow in its scope, as the setting is almost non-existent, and the plot has been intertwined in a way that nothing exists without serving a narrative purpose. The world was such an important part of that original film as were the myriad of side characters that came in and out of the story with only tangential relationships to each other, whereas this one narrows the cast down significantly and can’t be bothered to look up from its own convoluted mechanics to give us an idea of what kind of world we’re supposed to be living in. It’s a Crow movie with no magic that isn’t painfully explained, a setting that doesn’t feel on the brink of collapse, and a villain that doesn’t reflect man’s inhumanity to itself. I’m halfway convinced that this was originally a Spawn reboot which was much more concerned with its lore and larger than life characters, but even that franchise deserves a better movie than this.
Divorced of any context, this is a barely competent revenge movie that manages to get from A to B with little fanfare, and this is the most generous interpretation I can make. Any comparisons to the source material, whether it’s the comics or the 1994 movie, only highlight this movie’s inability to capture any genuine heartache that lies at the center of its story. I’m at least sympathetic to the ways that it wanted to make changes to the original story as its not impeachable and could have used a few modern touches, but this was made with very little imagination and so there was nothing to fill the void after it stripped everything else away. It’s a tiresome cliché for critics to say that a new version for the kids is not as good as our version from thirty years ago, but this doesn’t come across as a creative vision from an upstart young filmmaker; rather it has the stench of a film cobbled together by a committee where no one under the age of forty had a seat at the table. This is not the worst kind of movie out there, but it’s perhaps the worst kind of remake; one that is both too infatuated with the original to think outside the box and too single-minded in its approach to appreciate what made the original so special in the first place. This is perhaps a fascinating watch for anyone who’s curious about what you shouldn’t do when adapting a beloved property. For everyone else, this is an easy skip. They spent over a decade trying to bring this franchise back to life for one more paycheck, which hopefully means that James O’Barr got a nice chunk of change from it, but perhaps it’s time to lay it to rest once and for all.
The Reviewers Unite 