Riot’s Reviews: The Crow
Oh boy, the ill-advised Hollywood “reimagining” is rearing its ugly head once again. 2024 has been a long year of sequels, prequels, and remakes, near devoid of original stories and IPs. Granted, they haven’t all been losers and lately it’s sequels that have the most luck of being diamonds in the rough (Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine are clear standouts of the year so far). Amongst the three adaptations of original stories though, the biggest gambles lie with the remake, with the payoffs being few and far between and even when they hit, they often do little to recapture the hearts of the original fan base. Needless to say, trepidation was at an all-time high the minute I heard about a remake of the cult classic, The Crow. I’ve been a long-time fan of the 1994 film but I admittedly know little about its comic book source. But as a typical, angst laden teen growing up in the early ‘oughts, it really hit for a number of reasons: the music and action sequences; the tragedy/controversy surrounding Brandon Lee’s death on set; the intriguingly dark artistic palette; the memorable and poetic dialogue; the deeply relatable themes of love, justice, and revenge. It wasn’t a flawless film to be sure, but its natural grittiness and the heroes’ willingness to get his hands dirty to see justice served was too good of a story to forget. Had Lee survived, I’m certain any sequels would have found a way to be as memorable as the first, instead of devolving into a series of cringe inducing melodrama not worthy of their predecessor. The previous sequels failed to recapture the magic of the first, so it begs the question who got the bright idea to try again, why they thought it would work this time around, and how this “reimagining” of The Crow made its way up the ladder and into the theater.
No surprises here, The Crow was an absolute disaster. Instead of trying to find things that the movie did right, I’m just going to lean into all the things it did wrong. And I think, this time around, I’ll actually dive into the spoilers since I don’t want to be vague about all of the elements that turned this film into a colossal failure.
Desecrating the characters of Shelly Webster and Eric Draven. At its most basic, the casting of this movie was beyond off par and it starts right away with the young protagonist lovers. In the first film, what do we know about the couple? They're two were young, idealistic lovers and innocent victims in their grisly murder. Eric, being The Crow himself, is the main character throughout and spends his time balanced between a state of mourning and the crushing need to exact revenge on the people who killed his beloved. Sarah (Rochelle Davis) lets the audience know in the opening monologue exactly why Eric is given his powers, because “something so bad happens that a terrible sadness is carried with it and the soul can’t rest.” The pairs’ innocence is the catalyst to the dramatic revenge story. What do we get with this new iteration? A pair of drug addicts that are essentially getting their just desserts. How can I say such a cruel thing, you ask? Because the film tells you that’s what’s happening! The Crow’s powers now aren’t linked to righting a great wrong that happened to a pair of innocent lovers, it’s linked to Eric’s ability to hold onto “true love.” There’s just one problem with that, when Eric finds out the dumb s*** Shelly was up to before they got together, he loses sight of his love and ends up losing his powers and dying!!! The dialogue of the film tries to desperately shoe horn this idea that innocent blood has been shed, but fails to give any evidence whatsoever that Eric (Bill Skarsgard) and Shelly (FKA Twigs) are in fact innocent. On the contrary, there’s a plethora of reasons to say why they both got what was coming to them! How emotionally involved can you be, how much can you as the audience believe in the path to redemption of a wrong, if even the main characters can’t be convinced?!
All of that is ignoring the fact that visually and aesthetically these two are just awful misses. Did the creators not learn from the mistake of Jared Leto’s joker? What was the thought process behind putting a completely inexperienced actress/musician in as Shelly, then essentially making the entire film be about her and NOT THE ACTUAL CROW?! I mentioned in a previous review that I had some optimism about Skarsgard in the role. I still think he’s pretty great, but to call it a miss cast is a generous understatement. The script turns him into a whiny, sniveling loser who is incompetently stumbling his way through the plot. Now, one issue I always had with the original film actually was the fighting prowess/competency of Eric Draven. Lee, being the son of arguably the most famous martial artist on the planet and a trained fighter himself, immediately set to task by near-effortlessly dispatching the baddies. Since his character was a musician and not a martial artist, it toyed with the believability a bit. As an overcorrection, this Eric is hapless and uncoordinated. The fight scenes (the few that exist) are certainly grittier because of this, but ultimately result in Eric soaking up bullets with his healing powers, spraying blood all over the place, then getting close enough to a bad guy to cut them down (with a short sword btw and as a point of personal annoyance, just spring for the full f***ing samurai sword!!!). His incompetence came off as just annoying instead of “based in reality” and the audience is left wishing for even a taste of some Brandon Lee badassery.
The painfully obvious lack of a compelling antagonist. One of the hallmarks of a great Superhero film is a great or even better villain. The Crow, being a comic book adaptation, therefore should understand this. In the 1994 version, the quad that commits the murder of Shelly and Eric are the targets of The Crow’s revenge. They are symbolically picked off one by one, Tin Tin (Laurence Mason) by his own knives, Funboy (Michael Massee) with a drug overdose, T-Bird (David Patrick Kelly) in a fireball explosion in his own car, and Skank (Angel David)…well he just gets thrown out a window (lol). The audience gets to see these horrible men finally get what’s coming to them and in the course of their dispatching, we learn (along with Eric) who the real villain is, Top Dollar (Michael Wincott). Top Dollar is a mysterious, violent, yet charismatic mobster, pulling the strings by sewing chaos and discord in the city, seemingly just for the mere fun of it. But we learn about these men and we anxiously stand by, waiting to see justice served.
What does 2024’s Crow give us as a villain? Vincent (Danny Huston), an assumptively wealthy businessman who trades the souls of “innocent” people for his own immortality by verbally compelling his victims to kill themselves or do other horrendous things? I write that statement as a question because the audience isn’t told how or why he got the deal, what his powers actually do, what influence he actually has in the real world or otherworld, why he targets Shelly and her family in the first place, and the list goes on. He doesn’t know how to fight, exemplified by the asinine “final battle” with Eric, and is featured so little throughout the film there’s nothing to be learned about his motivations. The creators chose to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to convince the audience that this was a love story we should care about (which I haven’t seen worse chemistry between a couple in a while) instead of giving us villains that we are invested in seeing pay for their crimes. In one of the film’s most drawn out scenes (it seriously drags for being an action sequence), Eric tears through an Opera house that is filled with a small army of nameless henchmen. Nameless is the key word here. We don’t know these men, nor do we care when he eventually gets to his real target, one of Vincent’s lackeys, Marian (Laura Birn) whom I had to look up the character’s name because she was so painfully forgettable! Now some of you might be thinking right now, “But Riot, Brandon Lee did that in the first movie too!” And you’re absolutely right. But what did we have up until that point? Three meticulous executions of villains that actually had character depth and emotionally charged reasons to be dispatched. The mobsters that Brandon Lee took out were like a minor annoyance to fend off before he reached his actual goal and were only there at the behest of Top Dollar, who could have avoided his own demise if he simply stayed the hell out of it. But in the end, the payoff was a rain-soaked swordfight on the top of a church! It was awesome! To call Eric and Vincent’s final confrontation a confusing, nonsensical mess is a legit compliment.
Leaning too hard into the paranormal and the gore. Now here is where my lack of knowledge about the comics may hurt my opinion about this aspect of the film, but this s*** made no damn sense. I already spoke about Vincent and Eric’s ill-defined “powers” but one of the most mind-boggling additions to this version of The Crow was a purgatory-style location that Eric is dipped in and out of more than a candle wick in a tub of wax. After the pair are murdered, Shelly and Eric are seen submerged in water, with Shelly sinking out of arms reach into a dark void of some kind. Because of the masterful writing (lol), the audience is spoon fed the plotline (and this happens literally throughout every single moment of the film) that Shelly went to hell. First of all, duh and second, what happened to these two being “innocent?” Eric is then baby birded everything that needs to happen by a mysterious figure named Kronos (Sami Bouajila, again had to look this up) who gives Eric the whole “true love” speech before pushing him into a shallow pool of water that transports him back to the land of the living. This happens multiple times. The diving in and out of this purgatory state (which is antithetical to what purgatory is actually supposed to be, but what do I know right?) is so painfully cliché that you’re baffled when it occurs over and over again. This is especially true at the final battle where Eric suddenly pulls Vincent into the dilapidated train station (I have no idea why a train station but okay) through a pool of water of some kind right? NO! Through a f***ing mirror!! Nothing is defined, nothing means anything, anything means doing whatever the creators want at any given moment for no reason whatsoever outside of the fact that it might look cool?!
Now, there’s the blood and gore. Sure, the original film wasn’t exactly subtle. After all, the audience needed to see Eric’s healing powers at work at some point. This version unnecessarily took the blood and gore to the ‘enth degree. I didn’t need to watch a girl slice her own throat open. I didn’t need to see Eric’s intestines poking out of his stomach before he pushed them back in. I didn’t need to see a henchman get decapitated like something out of an episode of Metalocalypse. And I didn’t need to see Eric throw two severed heads into a crowded audience of Opera-goers. Returning readers will notice a contradiction here and I readily admit, I am a fan of violent movies. What I typically enjoy is stylized violence, with choreography that matches and serves a purpose. This didn’t feel like it had a purpose. It felt like it was trying to be gross for grossness’ sake. Leaning into the supernatural and the oversaturated evil I think created this byproduct of “well, it might as well be super bloody then right?” Again, I reflect, where is the “innocence” in this movie?! There is so many elements of this film that reek of being not thought out and just flying by the seat of their pants assuming that people would just eat up the slop and say, “please sir, may I have some more?”
I actually could keep going but I’m gonna stop here for all your sakes. This might be my longest movie review to date and it’s unfortunate that it was for such a garbage film. At the end of the day, the enemy of a good story will always come down to writing. The script treats the audience like morons, shoe-horning plot lines and spoon-feeding exposition that an audience could easily draw their own conclusions for. It’s time wasted, when they could have spent it giving answers to questions that actually matter. I don’t need every single plot point explained to me and I don’t think any of you do either but I do need character development and reasonable motivations. The Crow was not only an insult to previous fans, it was an insult to fresh movie-goers being introduced to what were once compelling and memorable characters. Coupled with music and a score that was worse than hot garbage and absurdly awful CGI’d shots of crows that were somehow worse than 1994, I could not find a single redemptive quality to this movie and I promise you all, I tried.
Riot’s Rating: 0/10
P.S. Many thanks to my brother in law for coming along and suffering through this with me. I owe him a few more drinks for this one.
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