The Crow Review | Great Void

There is a lot to be said about director Rupert Sanders’ astonishingly misguided and sleepwalking reboot of The Crowbut you have to give it some credit. It’s a film that goes its own way, rather than following the path taken by every sequel to the 1994 adaptation of James O’Barr’s dark comic series about love and revenge from beyond the grave, starring Brandon Lee. Rather than offering a simplified, watered-down retelling of the same story three times, this version The Crow takes a familiar concept and turns it into one of the most leaden, sparkless, and boring superhero origin stories ever put to film. It makes every wrong decision along the way and manages to be just as bad as all the sequels, but at least The Crow 2K24 is a change. It’s a failure on every level, but hey, it’s a different kind of failure.

The plot is similar to the Alex Proyas original and all subsequent films. There are two wayward souls in love: Eric (Bill Skarsgård) and Shelly (FKA twigs). After Eric and Shelly escape from a closed drug rehab facility, their love grows while they hide. But their carefree happiness is shattered when a figure from Shelly’s past appears seeking revenge. Eric and Shelly are brutally murdered by gangsters working for the evil Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), a high-society gambler who lives a life of luxury as long as he delivers untainted souls to the devil. (At one point, the villain mentions that he’s centuries old, but later says he’s just a human made of flesh and blood, so other than whispering things in innocents’ ears to get them to do horrible things, I don’t really know what this guy is up to.) Shelly’s soul is sent to Hell, while Eric is given the supernatural chance to return from the dead to seek revenge, right the wrongs, and free his girlfriend’s soul from an eternity of damnation and torture.

The setup was created by screenwriters Zach Baylin (King Richard, Gran Turismo, Creed III) and William Josef Schneider is solid enough, even if it sounds more like a rejected treatment for a sequel to Constantine as a remake of The Crow. The character of Eric Draven is there. There are some crows. There is a love that endures death (even if their bond is paper-thin, FKA twigs has an awkward/distant/inexperienced screen presence, and the leads have chemistry that amounts to negative numbers). So far, so good, I guess. The problem then becomes Sanders’ rampant inability to give something so pulpy a pulse. Numerous sequels and a mediocre TV series have shown what not to do when reworking O’Barr’s blood-soaked formula, but none of them have been a real slog yet.

Sanders (the unwise live-action Ghost in the Shell, Snow White and the Huntsman) has removed every bit of dirt, grime and darkness that seeped from O’Barr’s pages and replaced it with a production design that looks like it was put together by someone staging photo shoots for a furniture catalog. This is not The Crow for the brooding, Cure-listening, leather jacket, piercings, cigarette-toting crowd. Sanders made this film for the up-and-coming, Burning Man-going, Urban Outfitters, CyberTruck, neon-glowing vape pen crowd. And, again, it might not have been so bad if the whole thing had been directed with a little more energy. It’s bad enough that the action is kept to a frustrating minimum in the first 80 minutes of what feels like a three-week-long film, but one thing The Crow “shouldn’t have” is a montage in which our hero chills with friends at the lake and looks less like a scene from a dark revenge thriller and more like an advertisement trying to sell the audience on a new RV.

But who am I to say what The Crow should or shouldn’t be? Good point, but I’m sure Sanders’ desire to give audiences anything but what they wanted to see borders on utter contempt and disdain for the entire project. It’s punk rock to not care what people think, but without energy and any sense of purpose, this is just apathy. Sanders takes an approach that is either delusional in its high-minded artistic ambitions or a really expensive, unfunny joke. After a needlessly long introduction to uninteresting characters full of banal, overstuffed dialogue that elicited many giggles from the preview audience I saw this with, The Crow turns out to be a really bad crime thriller rather than a film about an immortal daredevil bent on revenge.

In fact, Skarsgård visibly struggles with this character for most of the film. For a third of the film, Eric is sort of, but not quite, immortal, looking like a regular goofball with a few face tattoos and getting his ass kicked by the bad guys over and over again. (Our hero, people!) Skarsgård usually brings a lot of energy to his roles and even some warmth when asked to play antiheroes and protagonists, so Eric Draven should be right up his alley. But Skarsgård is so hampered by Sanders’ monotone, ambivalent direction that he fades into the background of his own lead role for almost the entire running time.

I say almost, because just when every last spark of hope seems lost, The Crow offers its only truly great scene, in which a revived Eric goes berserk trying to make his way to the main villains as they spend an evening at the opera. It’s a scene so emotional and exciting that I wonder if it wasn’t a reshoot that was necessary to spice things up a bit, or if this was a proof-of-concept video for a much better version of the film that was simply edited into whatever that is so the whole thing wouldn’t be for nothing. It’s so incongruous and out of character that this sequence seems like a completely different film. But don’t worry. When it’s time for the real showdown, The Crow immediately goes back to being depressingly bad and devoid of any interest. (I hope you enjoy watching people fall in slow motion or get thrown through things. There will be plenty of that throughout. The Crow.)

I am almost sad about The Crow to be so bad. It’s almost unfair to compare it to the 1994 original film, its countless bad sequels and the source material, because the goal is clearly to try something different. But when there are much better versions of it (and some that are worse but perversely more fun because of it), it’s impossible to see The Crow as anything but a colossal flop. This is a film that doesn’t want to be what it says it is, but also never figures out how to make that disdain interesting or engaging. It’s just a mess.

The Crow will be in theaters everywhere on Friday, August 23, 2024.