The audience’s predictions were right about this one – The Crow reboot is next-level bad.
Earlier in the year, we questioned if the reactions to The Crow reboot trailer were too harsh. Well, let’s go on record here and apologize for even suggesting that, because they weren’t harsh enough. Clearly. Rupert Sanders’ The Crow harbored all the good intentions of revitalizing the love story of Eric and Shelly for a new generation of fans, but it fails spectacularly. This film might be the worst one in the franchise yet – yes, even more terrible than The Crow: Salvation and The Crow: Wicked Prayer.
Don’t be surprised if Lionsgate Films eats crow – it’s a figure of speech; please do not actually eat the beautiful bird – after this embarrassing effort. Mild spoilers for The Crow reboot follow.
This isn’t Alex Proyas’ The Crow. Apart from the lead characters being named Eric and Shelly and a crow playing a part in reviving Eric’s soul for vengeance, there’s no other similarity to the film that starred the late Brandon Lee. In this version, Eric (Bill Skarsgård) and Shelly (FKA Twigs) meet and fall in love at a rehab facility before breaking out. Shelly carries a deep, dark secret from her past – and an explosive video on her phone – as she continues to look over her shoulder, fearing that the sinister Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston) will find her. Unfortunately, Shelly must be a terrible hider in a game of hide-and-seek, as she and Eric flaunt their best lives in the public eye. So, Roeg’s muscle finds and finishes them off; however, Eric receives a chance at redemption. There’s a way to return Shelly to the land of the living if he embarks on a quest of bloody vengeance.
Sounds like a simple plot on paper, right? Somehow, the film fluffs it up. The addition of Roeg’s supernatural powers adds unnecessary complication to the story. He feels more like a cartoonish version of Mephisto from Nicolas Cage’s Ghost Rider, with the powers of Allison Hargreeves from The Umbrella Academy, than a legitimate scary antagonist such as the one played by Michael Wincott’s Top Dollar in the 1994 original film. Plus, Roeg’s motivations and backstory remain held up by two toothpicks, much like every other character in this story. In fact, there are callbacks and allusions to Eric and Shelly’s pasts that still don’t make sense in hindsight. There’s almost an air of “just go with it” that doesn’t help to explain why the characters do and say what they do here.
Were important parts maybe cut out of The Crow reboot? Logic says yes. The film feels jigsawed to death where people fought over the final cut in the editing room. There’s a jarring rhythm that indicates this must have been a bruising battle between director Rupert Sanders and the financiers of the film, because one can almost sense the sections where someone made the decision to remove a crucial part of the story to ensure this movie falls under two hours in length.
Aesthetically, Bill Skarsgård’s Eric was always a hard sell. Looking like a cross between Machine Gun Kelly and Jared Leto’s Joker, it’s a radical departure from Brandon Lee’s iconic Eric Draven’s rock star appearance. That being said, Skarsgård convinces as Eric. There’s a torture and pain behind his eyes, leading everyone to believe he’s someone who hasn’t had a happy life until he meets Shelly. His love for her proves to be stronger than life or death, as he’s chosen to come back because of the purity of what he feels. He’s also lost, because he isn’t a violent person by nature. There are times in which he gets referred to as “a boy” in the movie, and that’s an accurate description of who he is.
For everything Skarsgård does right, he’s let down by his co-stars. Danny Huston’s Roeg comes across as every iteration of a demon in human form crammed into a best-of compilation, while his troops are nothing more than NPCs in the story. There’s no personality or development to any of their characters. In comparison, the 1994 film produced the likes of Funboy, Tin Tin, and T-Bird, who make the movie all that much more memorable, while here the supporting antagonists are non-entities.
Then, there’s FKA Twigs’ Shelly. Now, it’s uncertain if this is the direction given to the actor or the really poor script, but Twigs lacks any sort of charisma as the character. Every scene she’s in either involves her trying to look too seductive, breathy, or like a melodramatic protagonist in a music video for a ’90s ballad. In addition, the character does the dumbest things in the story that it comes as a surprise to absolutely no one that she and Eric are murdered.
The Crow reboot tries so much to be different from the original that it falls apart at the seams, becoming a pastiche of what it’s trying to honor. The only time in which it works is in the third act when Eric goes gung-ho in the violent opera scene and unleashes his fury, though a lot of this has already been spoiled by the trailers. Taking inspiration from John Wick and modern action films, the sequence holds nothing back, as Eric demonstrates a level of brutality that hasn’t been seen in the franchise before. In fact, one has to wonder why more of the film wasn’t like this to begin with. Rather than swing around on the thinnest of storylines, it should have been The Crow meets John Wick for most of the running time.
So, where to from here? Honestly, nowhere. The Crow reboot doesn’t reinvigorate the franchise or muster up the mildest of interest for a potential sequel, which Bill Skarsgård teased in an interview with Esquire. It’s a shallow and hollow film that lacks the emotional resonance of the original, and it’s likely to be forgotten as soon as it’s watched. Maybe it’s time that Hollywood lets Eric and Shelly rest in eternal peace and never revisit their story ever again.
