Director: Rupert Sanders
Writers: Zach Baylin, William Josef Schneider, James O’Barr
Stars: Bill Skarsgård, FKA Twigs, Danny Huston
Synopsis: Soulmates Eric and Shelly are brutally murdered. Given a chance to save the love of his life, Eric must sacrifice himself and traverse the worlds of the living and the dead, seeking revenge.
So, here’s what happened: Someone thought it was a good idea, and a good time, to remake The Crow, the 1994 gothic superhero flick based on a comic book series of the same name. Actually, I should clarify: Someone thought it was a good idea, and a good time, to remake The Crow, the 1994 gothic superhero flick based on a comic book series of the same name, all the way back in 2008. Hopefully, it’s not much of a spoiler to confirm that the subject of this review – a remake of The Crow, the 1994 gothic superhero flick based on a comic book series of the same name – came out just days ago, in the year of our Lord 2024; evidently, it took a minute to get things off the ground. And while it’s not necessarily uncommon for productions to take their time to come together, we’re not exactly talking about Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating Megalopolis here, as the issues with The Crow (‘24) aren’t about finances nor lack of interest in a big swing from a then-unknown filmmaker. No, The Crow’s inability to get remade can, on paper, be chalked up to one thing only: Hiccups.
Between 2008 and 2024, the project has been entered and exited for any number of reasons by dozens of filmmakers and stars. Stephen Norrington (1998’s Blade) was the first director to announce his intention to helm the remake; Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later), F. Javier Gutiérrez (Before the Fall), and Corin Hardy (The Nun) followed in his stead, both signing on and off at varying times. The first actor to appear in talks to star as the film’s main character, Eric Draven, was Mark Wahlberg; Bradley Cooper, Channing Tatum, Ryan Gosling, James McAvoy, Tom Hiddleston, Alexander Skarsgård, Luke Evans, Sam Witwer, Jack Huston, Nicholas Hoult, Jack O’Connell, and Jason Momoa were all considered in the years to follow, but eventually left the film. In short, when you Google the definition of “development hell,” the browser crashes and immediately begins playing the new Crow’s trailer on a loop. It lasts 24 hours, a significantly shorter process than the film’s production, but still rather torturous.
The same could be said for the original film, at least the complicated legacy it left behind after releasing 20 years ago. Although Alex Proyas’ sophomore feature-length effort evolved into a cult favorite, the film’s production is marred with its own darkness: its star, Brandon Lee, was killed on set when a prop gun wasn’t properly checked and fired a dummy bullet along with a blank. The shot hit Lee in the abdomen, fatally wounding him in the midst of filming one of his final scenes on the film. Following Lee’s death, Paramount opted out of releasing it; Miramax swept in and poured more money into the film, allowing for rewrites to be completed in order to work around Lee’s absence. His stunt double, future John Wick czar Chad Stahelski, ended up acting in Lee’s place, with the latter’s face being superimposed onto his double’s in post.
Why anyone would ever spend a decade-plus attempting to revamp a film with a reputation as safe as a black cat walking over a broken mirror as it passes underneath a ladder is beyond rationale, but to the credit of those behind The Crow’s reboot, at least they never intended to make a shot-for-shot revival. From Norrington to Hardy, and Wahlberg to Momoa, that has been the lone standing principle: That the new Crow should be a “reinvention” of James O’Barr’s comic book series, a “realistic, hard-edged and mysterious” drama as opposed to the “gloriously gothic and stylized” quality of Proyas’ original, as Norrington told Variety of his intentions for the film in 2008. If your definition of “realistic” involves Bill Skarsgård wearing a pink-ish, feathery overcoat that makes him look like Big Bird’s drug-dealing second cousin, then you’re in luck.
Oh, right, the new film’s stars. The powers that be finally landed on Alexander Skarsgård’s younger brother to play Eric Draven, a walking tattoo whose troubled childhood landed him in a rehabilitation institution. The part of Eric’s girlfriend, Shelly – played by Sofia Shinas in the original – went to FKA Twigs. The two characters bond in said institution and begin an intense love affair that leads to an escape plan, one that allows for some bizarre canoodling, albeit brief, given that a crime lord named Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston, shockingly playing a bad guy) wants them both dead. He gets his wish, and Eric descends to the afterlife, where he meets Kronos (Sami Bouajila), a spirit guide that gives Eric an opportunity to take Shelly’s place in Hell, should he return to the land of the living and avenge her death. If you’re trying to picture what a spirit guide could possibly look like in a film that appears as though it was designed by the twisted minds behind Hot Topic’s aesthetic, think Denzel Washington’s character in Gladiator II performed with all the flair of a midseason Riverdale episode. (“You will be my instrument,” only that instrument is an electric guitar that spurts fake blood with every strum.)
If that sounds like your bag, you’ll have quite the experience here. If not, congratulations on being an upstanding member of the human race. There’s something to be said for the ideas The Crow pretends to be interested in – crimes of passion, how a “hero” deals with the realities of perpetual purgatory, the notion that pink jumpsuits can live on after Paddington 2 – but when the film plays it all as though it was initially meant to be a one-night-only CW special, taking it seriously (as Norrington originally intended) is off the table. It doesn’t help matters that Rupert Sanders’ (Snow White and the Huntsman; 2017’s Ghost in the Shell remake) direction is littered with slow-motion set pieces that feel as though they were written directly into the slog of a screenplay that Zach Baylin seems to have been saddled with. One can’t begin to comprehend how the writer behind King Richard and Creed III – not gangbusting scripts, by any means, but serviceable ones – could have turned in The Crow as we see it today unless it was a paycheck job he was desperate to get off his desk as soon as it arrived. If his upcoming work on Justin Kurzel’s The Order is written in this vein, the entire film should be shuttered altogether.
But Baylin is the least of all evils here, for it stands to reason that no one from Robert Towne to William Goldman could’ve saved this hellscape from the stilted performances it contains, nor the vacuous filmmaking that brought it to life. (An ironic statement, given how dead it feels, not to mention how much it focuses on death itself.) We’ve seen the youngest Skarsgård play the personification of moodiness before, and perhaps no role of his has been as anticipated as that of Count Orlok in Robert Eggers’ forthcoming Nosferatu. Here, though, his performance is devoid of feeling, whether Eric is screaming at the death of his beloved Shelly or marching through bullet after bullet en route to The Crow’s final set piece in a massive opera house. Skarsgård hardly receives any help from those around him, not even Huston, an actor who can embody evil with a smirk, yet cracks nary a smile here as his character lords over his empire with overwhelming apathy; perhaps his performance was of the method variety.
Let’s face it: The Crow is one of the year’s worst films, a work that would be far better – but still never anywhere close to good – if those involved had refused to abide by the idea that it should maintain solemnity throughout. Watching its bloated runtime approach two wasteful hours, I couldn’t help but think about Morbius, a recent disaster that, while frustrating in its campiness, at least never bothered to make an attempt at being overly serious, let alone dignified. The Crow, meanwhile, is pretentious in its insistence on pretending that it has something to say, an act of desperation in hopes that its audience will be foolish enough to hang on every word. If you bother to try, you’re wasting a not-inconsequential amount of time chasing a futile dream that, in every other sense, is a nightmare. I’d suggest you don’t bother at all.
Grade: D-
