Review of the remake of The Crow: Should have stayed dead

Few blockbusters are as defined by their time as The Crow, the baroque lullaby of vengeance from beyond the grave that hit theaters in the summer of 1994 on the tailwind of tragedy. Brandon Lee, the film’s 28-year-old star (and son of martial arts legend Bruce Lee), was killed on set in a bizarre accident involving a prop weapon. The dark truth is that his death lent the whole film a morbid, life-imitating gravitas. You didn’t just see an actor playing a superhero rising from the dirt to avenge his true love. You saw, in a sense, the spirit of that actor, summoned to the screen in a posthumous performance that blurred the line between real and fictional loss.

Fortunately for everyone involved, no major calamity is befalling The Crow reboot, whose behind-the-scenes problems were rather mundane—a series of aspiring stars and creative teams that kept development in hell for years. Of course, it was more than just the creepy allure of Lee’s presence that made the original a hit. That film was a shabby runway show of a comic book fantasy that came through with style, attitude, and fashion sense, with the way it synthesized its gothic influences into an extremely marketable brand. This new Crow never tries to party like it’s 1994, which is both a relief and a reason it’s destined to become a footnote. Watching it, you’re more aware than ever of how inseparable The Crow is from its Generation X-gen.

Directed by Rupert Sanders, whose remake of Ghost in the Shell brought another ’90s landmark into the 21st century, the film loosely adapts the same James O’Barr comic about a murdered man who returns to life with a mystical bird in tow to hunt down the gang that killed him and his fiancée. But Sanders isn’t trying to recreate the ever-burning hellhole of Detroit in which Alex Proyas set the original. If that version of The Crow was clearly made in the shadow of Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns, this 20-year-later version is more indebted to Christopher Nolan’s take on the Caped Crusader, trading bold flamboyance for a gritty “realistic” vision of a creature of the night. (We even get a shot of his winged friends circling him in a Batman Begins-esque cyclone of rebirth.)

Gently tormented Eric (Bill Skarsgård, back in clown makeup after his time as Pennywise) and vulnerable Shelly (pop star FKA Twigs) meet in a prison-like rehabilitation facility before escaping the house and building a life together. Unfortunately, Shelly’s past catches up with her, and the two are murdered in their love nest. (Just murdered; it’s another sign of changing times that this Crow omits the first half of the rape-revenge formula that the original flippantly exploited.) The smartest decision in William Schneider and King Richard screenwriter Zach Baylin’s script is to devote some time to the romance at the story’s center, rather than relegating it to chic flashbacks. But the relationship never develops beyond fashionable smooching. This isn’t exactly a love story for the ages, and so Eric’s subsequent killing spree doesn’t produce the operatic heartbreak it desperately craves.

Between gunfights, Eric returns to an afterlife limbo reminiscent of a foggy, swampy underpass beneath a bridge. “You’d think they’d have come up with something better,” quips our hero’s helpful spirit guide (Sami Bouajila). This patron saint of the Enlightenment means business: You’ll miss the lurid visual fantasy Proyas brought to this pulp material. The plot, adapted for a new generation of mascara-wearing goth kids, is like something out of a My Chemical Romance concept record, with Eric agreeing to hunt down his lover’s killer—a literal servant of Satan who condemns innocent souls to hell in exchange for immortality—in order to free Shelly from the underworld. It’s a pleasantly over-the-top direction for The Crow, but like almost everything else in the film, it feels half-baked, even with Danny Huston as a John Wick-esque aristocratic villain who whispers unholy suicide curses into his victims’ ears.

Skarsgård once again flies his freak flag at the intersection of handsome and creepy, and is as close to perfect casting as you can get for a 2024 version of The Crow. He’s like an unholy lovechild of James Dean and Peter Lorre—the perfect combination for a sensitive artist who becomes an angel of death. And when Skarsgård can’t quite escape Lee’s shadow (how could he?), he looks great with tattoos, black eyeliner, and a sword swung over his shoulder. In his best moments, like a slow-motion saunter to The Veils’ “Total Depravity” (a beautiful modern counterpart to The Cure, whose gothic splendor both inspired the original and provided the soundtrack), this Crow fakes his own brand of rock-star cool. And cool is pretty much all that matters with this character.

But even at less than two hours, the film drags on. It is more like a season of a Netflix series, where Surf Dracula only gets his board in the last episode. While the crow once immediately clawed its way out of the ground to then violently fool around in Act 1, he spends most of his time here Preparation to become The Crow. The denouement is entertaining enough: we get a splashy rampage through a concert lobby, Sanders cutting back and forth between Skarsgård’s digitally bloody warpath and a soprano crooning. But the sequence’s late arrival highlights how little the film has delivered up to that point, how much it has robbed us of the adrenaline rush of its MTV-meets-kung-fu predecessor.

The Crow is not the hapless disaster that its difficult road to release would suggest. Here and there it achieves a certain degree of atmospheric appeal, a touch of style. And it never stoops to the cowardly way of simply retracing the 1994 version and pointing to the gothic multiplex milestone you already know and love. But taking this material out of its original context – detached from the idea of ​​a graphic novel and music video from another era – reveals just how much these Hot Topic elements Are The crow. Without it, you see just another typical pastiche of a vengeful vigilante, doomed to oblivion after the last blink of an eye and the black wings. “Do you think angsty teenagers would build us shrines?” Shelly asks as the two lovers jokingly consider jumping into the freezing water. But those shrines have already been built, consecrated and worshipped by several generations of sullen outsiders who won’t give this version of Eric and Shelly’s tragic story a second thought.