The Crow

dir: Rupert Sanders

2024

Thirty years have passed since the original film came out. Inexplicably it became and remains something of a cult classic amongst sad, chubby people my age, you know, people just like me.

I went and saw the movie in the theatre with my girlfriend at the time. The relationship did not last long past the end of the film, I don’t think. She did not enjoy the experience, at all.

On my part I probably apologised hundreds of times for dragging her to such a terrible flick, but it was to no avail. Some relationships cannot be saved, some loves cannot be redeemed, even with the powers of supernatural crows or the support of tangential characters.

In case my language has been indelicate or ambiguous – the original Crow is a terrible movie. I don’t care what anyone says, what generous curve someone invents to grade against; by any metric of what makes a movie half decent, it fails on every level imaginable.

And yet – there was that soundtrack that people really, really liked. Some people even bought it (on tape) and listened to it thousands of times. There was the emotional frisson of sacrifice that came from the knowledge that the very talented lead Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee, died during the making of the film.

Some particularly pathetic people had posters of the talented Brandon Lee in full gothic gear and clown makeup on the walls of the flats and hovels they lived in for the rest of the 90s…

And by talented, I mean he was a talented martial artist, who was good in one other film he made (Rapid Fire), but put in a ludicrously arch and blundering performance as the “hero” of the title here. I mean, the dialogue is fucking wretched in this flick, and his performance and delivery is cringeworthy throughout. He says and does such dumb things throughout this whole goddamn flick.

And yet… They decided to make a new Crow. And it’s not even as bad as the original. It finds new, modern ways to be mediocre.

Its main, major sin is that it’s a dumb premise, and it’s a property that just really didn’t need to be resurrected.

See, there’s this guy, who loves a girl. Then some bad guys come along and kill them. Then a crow resurrects the guy, who really, really liked that girl, and that guy has to kill a bunch of people before he can be reunited with his beloved in death.

They made five films and a tv series based on this stupid premise. Except for the element whereby the protagonist has to die first, it is no different from fifty million other movies that have exactly that premise.

It’s like they’ve never heard of revenge before.

This isn’t even the only bad revenge flick Bill Skarsgård is in this year. He probably have five more coming out before December. At least, though, in Boy Kills World he gets to do some cool stunts and fight choreography.

There’s none of that here, not at all. The one element they do differently is that (I think) they try to get us to think that there is more of a loving relationship between The Crow this time and the woman whose murder he wants to avenge, being Shelly (FKA Twigs).

Mileage varies. It’s what it does. But I don’t know if the lengths they go to here matter that much. In the original, they’re dead when the flick begins, and we’re just shown how in love the lovebirds were with montage shots of them cuddling or mumbling sweet nothings to each other. Here we have two damaged addicts meet in rehab, fall in love, escape and pretty much hang out with the jet set and do a bunch of drugs before they get murdered for dumb reasons.

It’s a perilous path, and most of the acting doesn’t really nail anything down. FKA Twigs, as you would expect from an accomplished musician and performer, isn’t that convincing as an actor. And Skarsgård plays this like he plays everything, in that he looks cool but doesn’t express much of anything.

When the script / other actors start talking about true love this and true love that, and how much Eric must love Shelly in order to make everything okay again, I felt like I wished a character has asked him, after he declared his undying love yet again, “yeah so dude what’s her surname, again?” And I wished he’d said “um, dunno?”

When he is resurrected, he is told he has a chance to make things right and reunite himself and herself somehow if his love stays true, and if he kills the people who done them wrong. Eric is like “fuck that, that must be bullshit” even though he’s somewhere he wasn’t before, and there’s millions of crows everywhere.

He lives, again, and kills a few people, but then gets killed again, for reasons? He reappears in this weird industrial otherworldly landscape, but when he’s back in the real world which is masquerading as an American city, it’s clearly not an American city. I have no idea where it is (Prague), but it’s clearly neither New York nor where they used to film to pretend to be New York (Toronto).

It’s not even Detroit, where I would have thought it would be so cheap to film these days. The villain here is Danny Huston. I am referring to the actor rather than the character name, because by this stage I am convinced that Danny Huston must be a villain in real life. He plays nothing but villains, disgusting gross villains. There’s something supernatural going on, but honestly, what fucking difference does it make? He is some really rich guy that goes to the opera whenever he feels like it, like all villains, and he has these strange German-looking white supremacists running around killing people for him, but really, is any of that necessary?

There is this character called Marian, played by Finnish actor Laura Birn, and she does nothing throughout the whole fucking film other than stand there or sit there looking blonde! People say things to her, she gets some phone-calls and texts, but what does she actually do? She is one of the people Eric has to kill, but why? She’s not even a middle-man / middle management: She’s just a person who happens to be there blondly.

When this inexplicable flick gets to what is going to be something of a climax, Eric is told “no, seriously, THIS time you have to kill all the bad guys”, he marches himself to the opera and kills a whole bunch of henchpeople before killing Marian. Not with skill, not with anything other than continuing to attack people until they are dead. And then he’s like “I will now kill the main bad guy.”

But then…why was there the whole dull, grinding, boring opera thing? Why even have that sequence? There is this strange set up about this set of mega wealthy aristocratic people all over the place, which excludes Eric but seems to include everyone else, including his beloved and her mother, but what does any of it even mean? When you’re so rich that you live in this milieu where you can stay in the mega-apartments of rich friends who are out of town, instead of pay for rent or even your own drugs / tattoos, there is something that’s being said but I have no idea what.

Eric has his own place, but other than being filled with mannequins, he seems like even less of a character than anyone else.

I guess there could be a movie where an actor with face tattoos can still craft a believable, enjoyable character that isn’t called Harley Quinn, but it hasn’t happened yet, and it certainly doesn’t happen here. I’ll be honest I fucking hated this flick and I will not watch it again.

4 times this is a very mediocre remake of a bad movie, but at least there were some great songs on this soundtrack too out of 10

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“I'm going to kill them, every last one of them” – yeah, yeah, heard it all before - The Crow