There’s a lot that can be said about director Rupert Sanders’ bafflingly misguided and somnambulant re-boot of The Crow, but you have to give it some credit. It’s a film that’s carving its own path rather than taking the route every sequel to the Brandon Lee starring 1994 adaptation of James O’Barr’s dark comic series about love and revenge from beyond the grave did. Instead of offering up a simplistic, watered down rehash of the same story three different times, this take on The Crow takes a familiar concept and turns it into one of the most leaden, spark-free, and dull superhero origin stories ever adapted to film. It makes every wrong decision along the way and manages to be equally as bad as all the sequels, but at least The Crow 2K24 is a change of pace. It’s a failure at every level, but hey, it’s a different kind of failure.
The set-up is somewhat similar to Alex Proyas’ original and all the ones that came after it. There are two wayward souls in love: Eric (Bill Skarsgård) and Shelly (FKA twigs). After escaping from a locked down drug treatment facility, Eric and Shelly’s love grows as they hide out. But their easygoing bliss is shattered when a figure from Shelly’s past comes looking for revenge. Eric and Shelly are brutally murdered by thugs working for the evil Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), a high society player who lives the high life as long as he provides the devil with untarnished souls. (At one point, the villain mentions being centuries old, but later says he’s just a flesh and blood person, so outside of whispering things into the ears of innocents to make them do terrible things, I don’t really know what this guy’s deal actually is.) Shelly’s soul is sent to hell, but Eric is given the supernatural chance to come back from the dead to exact revenge, set the wrong things right, and free his girlfriend’s soul from an eternity of damnation and torture.
The set-up provided by screenwriters Zach Baylin (King Richard, Gran Turismo, Creed III) and William Josef Schneider is solid enough, even if it sounds a lot more like a rejected treatment for a sequel to Constantine than it does a remake of The Crow. The character of Eric Draven is there. There are some crows. There’s a love that transcends death (even though their bond is paper thin, FKA twigs makes for an awkward/aloof/unseasoned screen presence, and the leads have chemistry that measures in negative numbers). So far, so good, I guess. So then the problem becomes Sanders’ rampant inability to give something this pulpy a pulse. Numerous sequels and a so-so television series have shown what not to do when re-working O’Barr’s blood soaked formula, but none of them have been an outright slog until now.
Sanders (the ill-advised live action Ghost in the Shell, Snow White and the Huntsman) has taken away every shred of grit, grime, and darkness that oozed from O’Barr’s pages and replaced it with production design that looks like it was fussily put together by someone staging photo shoots for a furniture catalogue. This isn’t The Crow for the brooding, Cure listening, leather jacket, piercings, and cigarettes crowd. Sanders has made this one for the upwardly mobile, Burning Man attending, Urban Outfitters, CyberTruck, and neon glowing vape pen crowd. And, again, it might not have been all that bad if any of this was staged with some energy. It’s bad enough that the action is kept to a frustrating minimum for the first 80 minutes of what feels like three weeks of movie, but one thing The Crow shouldn’t have is a montage where our hero has a chill session at the lake with friends that looks less like a scene out of a gritty revenge thriller and more like a commercial trying to sell the audience on a new RV.
But who am I to say what The Crow should or shouldn’t be? Fair point, but one thing I am sure about is that Sanders’ desire to give the audience anything but what they came to see borders on outright 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, that’s just apathy. Sanders adopts an approach that’s either delusional in its high minded artistic ambitions or a really expensive, unfunny joke. After an unnecessarily long introduction to uninteresting characters filled with banal, overwritten dialogue that elicited a lot of chuckles from the preview audience I watched this with, The Crow shifts into being a really bad detective movie, not a film about an immortal badass bent on revenge.
In fact, Skarsgård is visibly struggling with this character for a majority of the film’s running time. For a third of the film, Eric is kinda-sorta-but-not-really-un-killable, looks like a regular doofus with some facial tats, and repeatedly gets his ass handed to him by the villains. (Our hero, folks!) Skarsgård usually brings a lot of energy to his roles, and even some warmth when he’s tasked with playing anti-heroes and protagonists, so Eric Draven should be right up his alley. But Skarsgård is so hamstrung by Sanders’ monotone, ambivalent direction that he fades into the background of his own starring role for almost the entire running time.
I say almost because – just as every last shred of hope seems to be lost – The Crow offers up its one truly great scene, one where a reinvigorated Eric goes nutso trying to make his way towards the chief baddies while they’re out for a night at the opera. It’s a scene so visceral and exciting that it makes me wonder if it wasn’t a re-shoot mandated to amp things up a little, or if this was a proof-of-concept reel for a much better version of the movie that just got edited into whatever the heck this thing is so the whole thing didn’t go to waste. It is so out of tone and out of character that this sequence hits like a different film entirely. But don’t worry. When it comes time for the actual climactic showdown, The Crow goes immediately back to being depressingly bad and devoid of anything interesting. (Hope you like watching people falling or being thrown through things in slow motion. You’re in for a lot of it throughout The Crow.)
I almost feel sad about The Crow being this bad. Comparing it to the original 1994 film, its myriad bad follow-ups, and the source material is almost unfair, because the goal is clearly to try something different. But when much better takes on this exist (and some that are worse, but perversely more enjoyable as a result), it’s impossible to see The Crow as anything more than a colossal misfire. This is a movie that doesn’t want to be what it says on the tin, but also never figures out how to make that disdain interesting or engaging. It’s just a mess.
The Crow opens in theatres everywhere on Friday, August 23, 2024.
