There’s a scene early in The Crow where Bill Skarsgard’s Eric is standing over a bridge with his girlfriend Shelly, played by FKA Twigs. As they look over the water, Shelly remarks that if they were to die all of the emo teenagers would weep for them and leave cigarettes and white flowers at their grave. While I wasn’t sold on The Crow whatsoever up until that point, it was then when the script started to pine how iconically emo its story is that I officially checked out. And I wasn’t even a half-hour into the movie.
I don’t think I’m shocking anyone when I say that The Crow is a bad movie. Disregarding everything having to do with the original film and its star, Brandon Lee’s, tragic death, this is a movie that shouldn’t have been made. People have been trying to make it for 16 years and despite setback after setback and no one wanting to finish it, with director after director dropping out and lead actor after lead actor leaving the project, it’s finally here and it’s completely soulless. I’m not someone who tends to make hyperbole about how something is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen because I know there’s always something worse out there. This is what’s out there.
The Crow
Director: Ruper Sanders
Release Date: August 23, 2024 (Theatrical)
Rating: R
From the director of Ghost in the Shell comes The Crow, a “reimagining” of the original 1994 movie and the comic that it was based on. In it, Eric Draven is a man who falls in love with a young woman named Shelly, but they’re both killed suddenly and Eric, unable to move past her death and fueled by her love, comes back to life as The Crow, a supernatural being dead set on bringing to justice the people responsible for their deaths. In this version of the story, they’re murdered by a businessman named Roeg (Danny Huston), who can’t die because he struck a deal with the devil (don’t ask, the movie never explains what that’s about). Eric must kill his way up the corporate ladder to avenge his beloved.
Do you remember the mid-2000s emo scene? I know it’s not exactly easy or pleasant to think back to bands like My Chemical Romance, movies like Twilight, and the era where Hot Topic dictated fashion for an entire generation, but The Crow does everything in its power to channel that era. While taking that aesthetic and style of that time is fine, the film should actually do something with it. The aesthetics of the film feel exactly like what a teenager’s perception of edgy is. Is there a tragic romance? Yup. Do we have explicit and often unnecessary curse words thrown in to sound mature? Sure do. Half-naked people walking around for no reason? It wouldn’t be emo without them!
I’m tempted to call The Crow another example of style over substance, but there’s hardly any style here. The film is grim and dark, but not in a way that’s viewable. Not simply tolerable, but honest to god viewable. There are numerous parts of the movie where the lighting is so dark or the cinematography is so murky that I genuinely had problems figuring out what I was watching. Important characters will appear and act like we’re supposed to know them, but because the scene they were introduced in was so poorly lit, I struggle to remember if I met them before or not. Even then, sometimes characters are just introduced in a scene and act like they’ve been there for the whole film, such as Eric’s best friend who appears midway through the movie and talks to him without any introduction.
Copyright: Lionsgate
You want to know if you’ll like this movie or not? Go watch the first half hour. That alone will tell you if you’ll dig what The Crow is offering or not because it has until the end of the first act to establish the most important thing about the narrative – the romance between Shelly and Eric.
When you break it down to its bare essentials and remove the dark aesthetics, edge, and superhero shtick, The Crow is a love story. It’s a story about how a man loses the only woman he ever loved and will never be able to get her back and now only exists to try and avenge her death. It’s a Gothic romance, and one that resonated with audiences in the 90s exactly because of how affecting the relationship was in the original movie. But with only 30 minutes dedicated to watching Eric and Shelly fall in love if you’re invested in their relationship, you can probably find something to enjoy in this remake. If you can’t believe their relationship and think they have no chemistry, the rest of the movie will fall flat. Take a random guess which side I’m on. Spoilers, it’s the negative one.
While I’m not exactly the biggest fan of Bill Skarsgard as an actor, he is, at least, capable. I can’t say much for FKA since, to my knowledge, this is her first leading role, but both of them simply do not connect. A part of that lies with the director and the script. An actor is only as good as the material they’re given and the person directing them, so when you have a script that feels like it’s gone through a dozen different revisions and a director who isn’t exactly good, of course, the result is going to be bad. Eric and Shelly meet, they fall head over heels in love and escape from a bizarre rehab/prison, do some drugs, have sex, walk around half-naked, and BOOM – romance established. Except it isn’t and now I have to watch another hour of this slop.
Make no mistake, slop is the ideal word. There’s no artistry present in The Crow, despite how it tries to paint itself as this beautiful tragedy. There has to be an emotional core here, and no one is even pretending to care. Everyone mumbles their way through lines and even when faced with certain death, they can barely raise their voice. One of my favorite moments in the film is when Eric approaches one of the guys who killed him as he’s smoking in his car. He glances at Eric and without changing his expression, remarks how he thought he killed him in the same way that you’d say thank you to a cashier at a bodega. It’s so unenthused that you would believe the entire cast had downed bottles of Ambien before the cameras rolled.
Copyright: Lionsgate
The only time, and I mean the ONLY time, the film actually managed to catch my interest was with one of its action scenes. There’s hardly any action in the movie – only four scenes from what I can remember – but one of them wasn’t just good, but great. It was a scene at an opera where the film decided to cut loose completely and go all in on the fact that The Crow, at least in this film, is basically a superpowered zombie. Here we see Eric slice and dice bodyguards with some pretty creative kills and being shot with dozens of bullets, all while we cut to an opera going on with shots that mirror the action taking place outside. It’s genuinely an excellent scene and one that stupifies me why it’s in The Crow. Like, this is a scene that could have worked in a John Wick movie and be a highlight of the film, and yet here it is just thrown into the climax of an otherwise unremarkable and downright lethargic action movie.
I’m struggling to think of what else to say about this disaster of a movie other than it’s bad. I may love to write reviews about terrible movies, but after a certain point, you can only reword “it’s bad” so many different ways that sound fresh. Everyone knew that this movie was going to be bad. It bombed at the box office, and while it isn’t as big of a bomb as Borderlands was earlier this month, I would argue that this movie is just as bad, if not worse. While that movie definitely felt like it was too little too late in adapting a series that has a polarized reception nowadays, this just feels unwanted. I could see a time when a Borderlands movie would have been a hit. I can’t think of a time when a reboot of The Crow would have been desired. I wouldn’t want to see either movie again, but at the very least I can remember a few things about Borderlands from a visual perspective. Not so much here.
The Crow is bad. It’s a movie that knows it’s bad and doesn’t care that it’s bad. In a way, it’s the perfect representation of emo culture. It doesn’t care that it’s just darkness and moping and edginess and wallows in it. And you know what? Let it. Let the movie stew in the misery of its own making. Everyone is pointing and laughing at it anyway, so consider me one of the fingers out of millions pointing and laughing at this sad movie that undermines a legitimately good movie and exists solely to… I would say make money, but even the original director of the 1994 movie has stated that this remake can’t be a crash grab cause there’s no cash to grab. That alone sums up this movie perfectly. It was a shameless cash grab that couldn’t even nab profits correctly.
