It doesn't matter how low your expectations are for Rupert Sanders' The Crow, because this callous and clumsy remake will still fail to exceed them. But this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.
Director Alex Proyas' 1994 The Crow was a hit at the box office, but its fandom truly exploded in the following years; this was due, in part, to the electrifying performance of its late leading man Brandon Lee, who was fatally injured in the movie's making. Three sequels followed, boasting stars like Kirsten Dunst, Iggy Pop, and Edward Furlong, but none could recapture the magic of Proyas and Lee's collaboration. That didn't stop folks from trying. A relaunch of The Crow has been threatened for over a decade. Now, 30 years after the first adaptation of James O'Barr's dark and deeply personal comic books arrived on the big screen — with a game-changing soundtrack to match — The Crow returns, like the revenant at its center. But unlike poor Eric Draven, there's no heart at the center of this grim and gruesome reboot.
It's Bill Skarsgård and British singer/songwriter FKA twigs star as doomed lovers Eric Draven and Shelly Webster. This time around, however, they won't be swiftly slaughtered in the first act by a vicious gang led by a nefarious and chicly goth kingpin. Instead, screenwriters Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider construct a convoluted and yet ambiguous urban hellscape run by Roeg (a smarmy Danny Huston). This villain may look like your average wealthy and powerful white man who treats everyone like pawns in his twisted game, but also, he's an actual demon, collecting souls to extend his life on Earth.
This change from the 1994 movie means Eric isn't just unleashing violence on a Detroit drug ring in the name of love and vengeance. It means he's looking to save Shelly's soul from the grips of hell itself. And this time he is not the cackling dark clown, swaggering shirt-off and bare hips out, swinging from broken window frames and relishing the kill. A grim and pretentious opening sequence involving a hurt horse and a mucky rural landscape establishes this Eric as a country boy with vague but damning childhood trauma. Shelly can relate. She's got a hard history too, which is briefly alluded to when the two of them meet in rehab.
Where the first film began with the lovers as an established couple on the brink of marriage, this Crow chucks Eric and Shelly into a whirlwind romance that plays as if the screenwriters saw the trailer for American Honey. Once.
Drug-loving free spirits with wounded souls, they bond over cafeteria trays before escaping rehab to a series of inexplicable montages. The self-proclaimed "degenerates" wander into the swanky apartment of an unknown friend, allowing for a fashion show in designer clothes and lovemaking on silk sheets. Then they tumble into a day out with friends (whose are unclear) — which is odd as Shelly is on the run from Roeg.
While Proyas' The Crow established a cast of supporting characters who showed Eric and Shelly as a part of a community, this version takes such associations for granted. Across The Crow, characters aren't even introduced as much as they shuffle on-screen to provide a plot point, then either disappear or die. Likewise, Shelly and Eric's lives beyond their days-old romance are illustrated via flimsy quick cuts to flashbacks. These two are less characters and more a Pinterest board for a grungy, romantic aesthetic. Thought they have a certain chemistry, Skarsgård and twigs can't elevate the cringeworthy dialogue. The love story — which takes up the first 40 minutes of the film — is a tedious trudge to its inevitable tragedy.
Sanders, the director behind the largely forgotten fantasy-actioner Snow White and the Huntsman and the actively underwhelming live-action remake of The Ghost in the Shell, brings a sickly green/gray palette that recalls DCEU drudgery. Gone is the high-contrast face paint of Lee's sad clown, replaced with Skarsgård smearing tattoo ink across his eyes and high cheekbones for a look that reads more Jared Leto's Joker than The Crow. (That's in no small part to the barrage of trashy tattoos that litter Skarsgård's pale skin.)
To Sanders' credit, this palette does make the hard reds and blacks of blood and bile all the more putrid on-screen. The director seemingly relishes in the movie's R-rating, creating an ultra-violent spectacle that is at times hard to stomach, much less watch. Eric spends the first two-thirds of the film not only horrified by the violence inflicted on his own body — which is shot, stabbed, and run over — but also mortified to cause violence, gawping in shock when he takes a life with a gunshot through the chest. But he'll conveniently get over this in time for a finale that is overflowing with nameless goons who are ripped to pieces with a ruthless abandon.
I consider myself to have a pretty high tolerance for gore and violence on-screen, as I am an avid horror-lover. But frankly, I was aghast at the graphic violence of this Crow. Part of it is that the villains — outside of Roeg — are barely established. There's little individual flare, much less the evocative nicknames like Tin Tin, Funboy, and Skank, so these malicious minions become a row of blood-gushing dominoes to be knocked down on the way to the big bad. This kind of move might work in a sequel, where you trust in the hero and so follow him into moral gray areas readily. (See John Wick 2 through 4.) But this is not the Eric Draven that Crow fans know and love. He's an inferior imitation that lacks the haunting charm of Lee. Despite his efforts, Skarsgård's is more a pose than a protagonist.
In the end, 2024's The Crow is only an echo of an echo of the original, sometimes literally repeating the 1994 film's best lines, but in a new context that makes them more cringe than compelling. Sanders didn't even manage to create a soundtrack that scratches at the distinctiveness or greatness of the original. Ugly, incoherent, and ultimately cynical, The Crow evokes the words of wisdom from another horror movie about resurrected corpses on a rampage: Sometimes dead is better.
