The Crow (2024, dir. Rupert Sanders)

by Jack Martin | Aug 25, 2024

Certificate: 18

Running Time: 111 mins

UK Distributor: Entertainment Film Distributors

UK Release Date: 23 August 2024

WHO’S IN THE CROW?

Bill Skarsgård, FKA Twigs, Danny Huston, Isabella Wei, Laura Birn, Sami Bouajila, Jordan Bolger, Karel Dobrý, Paul A. Maynard

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Rupert Sanders (director), Zach Baylin and William Schneider (writers), Victor Hadida, Molly Hassell, John Jencks and Edward R. Pressman (producers), Volker Bertelmann (composer), Steve Annis (cinematographer), Jason Ballantine (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A murdered man (Skarsgård) is brought back to life with supernatural abilities…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON [TITLE]?

In a shock to absolutely nobody, The Crow – a reboot of the comic book-adapted film series that’s been in development for over fifteen years, during which countless filmmakers and lead actors have come and gone from the project – is pretty bad.

Even for a movie that no one was particularly thrilled about seeing, especially when many consider the 1994 version (most notorious for the tragic on-set death of lead actor Brandon Lee) to be untouchable, it’s pretty shocking that director Rupert Sanders’ film exists at all in its current dreary and unappealing form. It is dull to look at, filled with shoddy dialogue and stilted acting, and is so nonsensical that it makes M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap look like a sophisticated high-end thriller by comparison.

At least I wasn’t annoyed by it like I was during Borderlands (I’d rather listen to the trite conversations in this film on a loop rather than hear Jack Black’s Claptrap again). But make no mistake, The Crow is no less terrible.

The film opens with a supposedly nightmarish sequence involving a young boy and a wounded horse, which is actually meant to be a glimpse at the childhood of Eric Draven (Bill Skarsgård), who’s now in what is supposed to be some kind of rehab facility but is for some reason run like Shawshank Prison, complete with bullying guards and easily escapable facilities. It is in this weird place that Eric meets and falls for a woman named Shelly (FKA Twigs), who’s on the run from Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), a powerful crime lord who also has the ability to make people commit deadly acts by whispering in their ear, as some kind of unexplained deal he’s literally made with the devil.

Eventually, Eric and Shelly fall in love, despite neither actor sharing any believable chemistry with one another. However, their “happiness” (in quotes because their performances are so wooden that sometimes it’s hard to tell if they’re even happy or not) comes to a swift end when Roeg’s thugs catch up to them and brutally murder the two of them. Eric ends up in a crow-infested limbo where, thanks to a mysterious spirit named Kronos (Sami Bouajila), he is brought back to life with regenerative abilities that are – in all seriousness – powered by his love for the now-dead Shelly. Now, Eric is out for revenge against Roeg, his lackeys, and any and all henchman unfortunate enough to stand in his way.

Knowing very little about the original comics, or any of the other movies in this franchise, I don’t have the answers when it comes to calling this version of The Crow closer to the source material than the others. That being said, it would not surprise me if it turned out that this version is about as faithful as Josh Trank’s Fant4stic was to the original Fantastic Four, because the two are similar, and not in a good way. Like how Trank’s film felt like they rewrote a mediocre YA movie around that group of superheroes, a lot of this film feels as though it started out as an average supernatural revenge thriller, then they realised it was too similar to The Crow, so they just reworked it as that, as a means to finally get the long-gestating project off the ground. Either way, it’s unlikely to appeal towards fans of the original comics or the earlier films, even the direct-to-video ones, since it barely appears to have been made by people who have even read the comics (which I haven’t either, but at least I know enough to be aware of how little this seems to be connected to them).

Faithful adaptation or not, The Crow still blows due to the fact that it’s shoddily written, with dialogue so bad that you’d almost have to have a special talent to write conversations this atrocious, especially between our sparkless romantic leads who only ever appear to talk with each other about how much they love each other, and virtually nothing else. None of the characters are interesting or worth caring about, the villains feel like rejects from a CW supernatural series, and trying to piece together the plot would be to give it more attention and effort than the writers apparently did.

The script also fails to find a reason that makes the gothic aesthetic, which the 1994 film made iconic to where even those who never even saw the film would know that it’s The Crow just from looking at it, work in a more modern setting. With the main hero wandering about in the 2020s looking like he does, covered in tattoos and (much later on) black-and-white face paint and a long black trench coat, he just looks ridiculous, like he just wondered off the set of a vampire action film from 2003 to buy every CD album of The Cure that he can find while reciting his favourite poem by Edgar Allan Poe. As someone who grew up knowing a lot of goth and emo kids at school, it’s a hilariously dated throwback that even they might roll their eyes at, because most of them have probably gone on to become actual adults by now.

It’s also not a very pleasant film to look at, as Sanders – a stylish director who brought a decent visual flair to past films like Snow White and the Huntsman and Ghost in the Shell – employs some drab cinematography to compliment the script’s raging lack of personality. That being said, there are one or two moments where you can tell that the director is trying to liven things up, including a gory sequence primarily set in the lobby of an opera house that is committed to some creative kills, but these happen far too late into the movie, and well beyond the point where the viewer is meant to establish some kind of connection with these characters or this story. Plus, it’s shot rather darkly by DP Steve Annis, which means that a lot of the time you find yourself squinting to fully make out what’s supposed to be happening in a lot of these dimly lit scenes.

Is The Crow the disaster that pretty much everyone was predicting? Well, yeah, of course it is. I will say, though, that unlike some of this year’s other bad movies, such as Borderlands, Madame Web or Poolman, this one at least comes reasonably close to being just plain mediocre, primarily because of those limited moments that do hint at a much more confident movie underneath the rubble. That’s still not exactly high praise, but for a film with as troubled a history as this, it’s probably the best it could ever hope to achieve.

SO, TO SUM UP…

The Crow is a dreadful new take on the comic book character that is drab to look at, horribly written, filled with wooden performances, and fails to make the goth-drenched anti-hero look and feel cool in this day and age.