The journey to convey The Crow again to life has been as tortured as its immortal antihero. The unique 1994 adaptation of the comic-book collection, a few man who returns from the lifeless to search out his and his lover’s killers, turned a cult basic for its moody tone and grungy noir look. The movie additionally bore the burden of an on-set tragedy: Its star, Brandon Lee, died after being shot by a malfunctioning prop gun. (He’d accomplished sufficient work for the film to be completed in postproduction.) Sequels that adopted totally different males taking up the Crow moniker flopped—and although a possible remake of the primary movie was introduced greater than 15 years in the past, it appeared to linger in developmental limbo.
Which is the place it ought to have stayed. Directed by Rupert Sanders, who’s made a profession of mounting action-heavy, spectacle-driven reimaginings of preexisting materials, the brand new model of The Crow deepens the romance, enhances the violence, and dives additional into its protagonist’s supernatural origins. The end result, nevertheless, is a generic and plodding revenge thriller that’s nowhere close to daring sufficient to justify the franchise’s resurrection.
The 1994 model of The Crow stored issues easy: A musician named Eric and his beloved fiancée, Shelly, are killed by a neighborhood crime boss after they protest his intentions to evict them from their residence constructing. Eric comes again to life because of a mystical crow, as a result of—nicely, he simply does, and he begins a murderous rampage to avenge Shelly and himself. The brand new movie concocts a way more elaborate story, yielding a scattershot narrative that’s extra complicated than coherent. Shelly (performed by the singer FKA Twigs) has damning video proof proving the evildoings of a rich man named Roeg (Danny Huston), who additionally occurs to have demonic talents. Eric (Invoice Skarsgård), in the meantime, is a sullen, closely tattooed outcast haunted by recollections of his harrowing childhood. Hiding out at a rehab middle, Shelly and Eric fall in love over their mutual angst and appreciation for artwork—he likes to attract and write poetry; she’s a pianist with an angelic voice.
Although Skarsgård and Twigs share an appealingly offbeat chemistry, the movie struggles to stability their characters’ candy romance with the hyper-violent, supernatural conspiracy that results in Shelly’s demise. When Eric absolutely embraces his powers and begins to slaughter those that wronged him, among the kills are admirably gross, however many really feel particularly gratuitous, carried out on the expense of the tenderness and fragility of his courtship of Shelly. In some unspecified time in the future, Eric learns he can’t save Shelly with out sacrificing himself—however he appears not a lot offended or pained as he’s excited on the prospect of murdering dozens of anonymous henchmen. (Throughout a sequence by which he slices Roeg’s accomplices aside at an opera home, he gleefully tosses two of their severed heads into the terrified viewers—a picture that appears cool, however is very impolite.) The ugliness of all this extends to the set items too: Eric, when touring between life and demise, heads to a purgatory-like place, however the location quantities to a derelict, CGI-embellished practice station vague from the drab, rain-soaked, and unnamed metropolis the place Eric and Shelly reside.
The unique Crow is under no circumstances an ideal movie—its dialogue is commonly corny, its sentimentality heavy-handed—and I don’t imagine the comics are so sacred that they will by no means be tailored once more. However Sanders’s imaginative and prescient is simply uninteresting. Roeg is a bland, muddily motivated villain. The manufacturing design is unremarkable, as is the soundtrack. The extra Shelly is seen solely by means of softly lit flashbacks, the extra she turns into a set of tropes somewhat than an precise character, undercutting the primary act’s delicately portrayed love story. That the movie is doomed to be in contrast with the ’90s authentic is probably out of its makers’ management, however that they had loads of alternative to create one thing attention-grabbing. The supply materials, by the writer-artist James O’Barr, is a visceral work, with the story of Eric and Shelly underlining how simply grief can flip into an obsession that consequently turns into insanity.
Right here, O’Barr’s visible particulars are merely window dressing, like the attention make-up Eric applies with all the passion of a chaperone at a college dance. Sanders has stated that his model of The Crow isn’t a “Hollywood remake,” and to an extent, he’s proper. It’s not a remake of the 1994 movie; it’s simply one other darkish and gritty comic-book adaptation in a protracted line of darkish and gritty comic-book diversifications. For The Crow to fly once more, the movie wanted to supply one thing recent for right this moment’s viewers—one thing propulsive, audacious, and haunting. All it does, although, is exhume what got here earlier than.
