Studio: Lionsgate
Director: Rupert Sanders
Writer: Zach Baylin, William Schneider
Producer: Edward R. Pressman, Molly Hassell, John Jencks, Victor Hadida, Samuel Hadida
Stars: Bill Skarsgard, FKA Twigs, Sami Bouajila, Josette Simon, Laura Birn, Isabella Wei, Sebastian Orozco, Peter Parker Mensah, Danny Huston
Review Score:
Summary:
A heartbroken man returns from the dead with supernatural abilities that enable him to avenge his girlfriend's murder.
Review:
The people pushing director Rupert Sanders's 2024 version of "The Crow" made it emphatically clear through media and marketing that their movie is not a remake of director Alex Proyas's 1994 film featuring Brandon Lee. It's simply a second cinematic adaptation of writer/artist James O'Barr's seminal comic book. That's a horn they didn't need to blow so loud. The 1994 original was a groundbreaking Gothic thriller with an iconic antihero, dark drama, and influential intensity. The 2024 incarnation is a generic action movie with a lame look for the central character, predictable pathing, and skeletal superheroics. No one is in danger of confusing the two.
Who are these people behind this incarnation of "The Crow?" According to credits, they include five producers, five co-executive producers, 25 executive producers, and somewhere in the neighborhood of nine different production and finance companies. The list might have grown that long due to the project passing through numerous hands during three different decades of development hell. But if you're wondering who neutered the movie into common cable TV filler, this certainly smells like a soup where too many cooks added personal ingredients via studio notes until the final dish had no unique flavor whatsoever.
Eric and Shelly have a classic love story. Shelly is a former piano prodigy who ran in high society circles with Vincent Roeg, a music mogul who secretly exploits a supernatural ability to manipulate people into committing murders. Eric is a, well, all we know about his past is that a horse once died on his family's farm, but he and Shelly both seemingly lived lives of crime until crossing paths in a drug rehab facility. See what I mean by "classic?" Who among us can't relate to a relationship between two criminal junkies with backgrounds like theirs?
The story of "The Crow" is anchored by the passion between Eric and Shelly, and how his devastating heartbreak over her death drives him into vengeful violence. But this problematic presentation of Eric and Shelly immediately puts the movie in a hole by not incentivizing the audience to attach empathetic emotions.
After escaping incarceration, the couple shacks up in a lavish apartment belonging to Shelly's unnamed friend who's currently off in Antigua. They help themselves to his amenities, jump on his bed, drink his champagne, smoke a joint, and pop some pills. Additional scenes of Eric and Shelly's bond blooming feature the duo getting tattoos, swimming with other stoners, and grinding on each other in a noisy nightclub. They're reductively portrayed as guiltless freeloaders with no jobs, no ambitions, no real purpose, and no motivation for an audience to root for them. We're supposed to want Eric to go through Hell so what, he and Shelly can return to drugging and dancing together?
Roeg's fixer Marion, the one member of his crew vaguely shaped into a person who's more than a body brandishing a weapon, tasks a couple of henchmen with killing Eric and Shelly before Shelly can expose Roeg's evil. The two of them die, but Eric goes to a limbo where a "Wise Old Man" stereotype cryptically talks about a crow. Eric returns to reality imbued with the power to heal from fatal injuries, and he makes it his mission to save Shelly's soul by killing everyone responsible for their deaths.
Remember how O'Barr's comic and the 1994 film made the men Eric goes after memorable, and how they had flair-filled nicknames like Top Dollar, Funboy, and T-Bird? The henchmen in the 2024 film probably have names too, but you have no reason to know them considering how utterly interchangeable they are. Instead of colorful crooks to go after, "The Crow" gives Eric an endless supply of nobodies who may as well wear black eye masks and have "Goon" written across striped t-shirts. There's nothing intriguing about watching Eric track down and slaughter stuntman after stuntman instead of exacting a deserving vendetta against distinct villains.
Ironically, "The Crow" is at its most creative when it stages kills with style. The best sequences can still be seen as "John Wick" riffs, but gorehounds who are content with gruesome visual violence have plenty of sights to squirm at, including limbs getting sawn off and swords pushed through multiple bodies at once. That's to say nothing of the copious gunplay.
But because the participants have no depth, action repeatedly rings hollow. By the time Eric throws two decapitated heads into the audience at an opera for no reason other than to see innocent people erupt in panic, you'll feel completely disconnected from everything happening onscreen. For all its bangs, bruising, and bloodshed, "The Crow" should pack much more of a punch, except substandard scripting leaves it too weak-wristed to have the resonant wallop this story deserves.
Review Score: 45
Taking it as another step in expanding their filmography, the movie becomes more fascinating as insight into the Adams Family's creative advancement.