Alex Proyas’ 1994 film The Crow owes its enduring cult bona fides partly to high-style visuals rooted in peak-era MTV, a churning alt-metal soundtrack and way cool goth-chic fashion sense. But the larger factor behind the sleek thriller’s cultural imprint was the tragic accident during filming that took the life of promising star Brandon Lee at 28, echoing the death at a similarly young age of his father, martial arts legend Bruce Lee. Director Rupert Sanders attempts to slip out from under the original’s shadow by avoiding the word “remake” and calling this a modern reimagining of the source material. That doesn’t make it any less turgid.
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Drowning in brooding atmosphere, rain-slicked nightscapes and goopy eyeliner, and tossing in some retro flavor with tracks by Joy Division, Gary Numan and others, the new iteration of The Crow is more focused on aesthetics than storytelling. So it makes sense that one of the director’s inspirations was high-gloss French films of the ‘80s like Diva and Subway , part of the wave dubbed “Cinéma du look.”
Proyas and his screenwriters zipped through the gruesome killings of soon-to-be-wed Shelly and Eric with disturbing montage flashes, allowing them to dive swiftly into the lurid fun of resurrection and bloody revenge.
Adapted by Zach Baylin and William Schneider from James O’Barr’s comic book series, the reboot — or whatever you want to call it — plods with numbing inefficiency through a snoozy preamble. It successfully establishes neither the instantly eternal love between Eric (Bill Skarsgard) and Shelly (FKA Twigs), nor the sinister fiend who cuts short their rapture.
In fact, the villainous side of things here barely makes sense. Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston) is a man of enormous wealth with a taste for pretty female pianists, which seems of interest only because we see Shelly doodling at a keyboard. He gets his kicks sending women to hell with a devilish whisper in their ear and a little blood contamination, prompting them to turn dead-eyed before committing suicide or murder.
But where does this diabolical mind-manipulation power come from, and what made Roeg such a sicko creep? He says he’s been around for centuries, but if we’re to believe he’s a supernatural being of some kind, hatched from the same comic-strip mythology as Dead Eric, why is his skill set so different? Don’t expect answers to those questions. Whatever he is, Roeg is no substitute for Michael Wincott as a heartless cokehead with a silky sheath of chest-length headbanger hair and Bai Ling as his witchy consort.
In this version, Eric and Shelly meet in court-ordered rehab. She freaked out prior to her arrest when a friend sent her a video he secretly shot during a hangout that turned ugly and left her traumatized. The terrible events of that night are only suggested at first, but we know they are sufficiently incriminating to make Roeg want the video removed from circulation pronto. That leaves just enough time for Eric and Shelly to compare tattoos, develop incipient feelings for one another and escape rehab together when Roeg’s kill team, led by an elegant pair we’ll just call Fake Tilda Swinton and Fake Terence Stamp, track her down.
Holed up in a swanky pad conveniently left available to Shelly by a generous friend, the dreamy-eyed couple fall in love over stinky sex, a shared joint in the bathtub, pills, champagne and lots of ecstatic canoodling wrapped in gauzy white drapes. But they forget about Roeg’s resourcefulness long enough to picnic by the river, stroll around town and hit a dance club. Love is less blind than stupid, in this case.
When Eric and Shelly get home, they find Roeg’s hitmen waiting for them. Sanders and the writers have wisely scrapped the sadistic rape element from the first movie and show less interest in sensationalizing the murders. It’s probably the last smart decision they make.
Nobody encountering The Crow for the first or the 50th time needs too much fussy lore to slow down the action. It should be relatively straightforward: Dude dies alongside his beloved and re-emerges from the grave with rapid-healing powers that render him seemingly unkillable; a crow guides him to take out the evildoers that took Shelly from him, allowing them both to rest in peace.
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Here, Eric’s afterlife revenge odyssey begins in a swampy industrial wasteland between heaven and hell where an enigmatic character named Kronos (Sami Bouajila) reads him the rule book. The crows hanging about, caw-cawing up a racket, are tasked with carrying souls to the land of the dead. But Eric has unfinished business. “The crow will guide you to put the wrong things right,” Kronos tells him.
The image of Brandon Lee in body-hugging black leather and spandex under a fabulous trench coat that looked like it came off a Thierry Mugler runway, with a whopping great bird perched on his shoulder like some goth pirate, is so iconic that trying to replicate it would have been crazy.
As Skarsgard’s Eric and his mullet prowl the city picking off Roeg’s stooges in increasingly gory ways, he’s more often shirtless to display his chiseled torso and extensive body ink. At one point, a would-be assassin even obliges by tearing off Eric’s sweaty T-shirt during a blood-drenched clash. I almost shouted, “Ooh, girl, behave!”
There’s nothing about the walking-dead avenger (or the performance) to hold your interest through a lot of rote stabbing and chopping and shooting and skull-smashing. Nor is there even any flying out of windows until a double dive near the end.
The movie’s big set-piece is a scene at the opera, where Eric turns up on the trail of Roeg’s No. 2, Fake Tilda, whose actual name is Marion (Laura Birn). The architectural grandeur, bedecked with ornate gilt and marble and red plush, makes a setting for blood-letting that probably would have thrilled Luc Besson in the ’80s. But when Roeg’s seemingly endless crew of heavily armed assassins in impeccably tailored formalwear keep sprouting just as fast as Eric can hack them down, it all starts to seem like ersatz John Wick . Though it’s useful to know that an opera performance full of shrieking arias provides good audio cover for a killing spree.
There’s more back and forth and renegotiation with Kronos that doesn’t add much beyond allowing Eric to cry inky black tears and ultimately providing the vaguest of explanations for Roeg’s malevolence and its connection to Kronos’ suspended state. But the overload of otherworldly claptrap just dulls the already minimal involvement in the all-consuming love story that’s supposed to be the driving force.
DP Steve Annis shoots the movie like a series of music videos, which perhaps was intended to honor the screen adaptation’s ‘90s roots but instead just fudges the intersection between reality and the supernatural in dreary ways. Twigs and Bouajila do what’s required of them but can’t make their characters memorable, while Huston’s dark lord routine is borderline silly, more the script’s fault than the actor’s.
The Crow is a sluggish, overly self-serious gloomfest that never takes wing. Given the long string of directors and lead actors attached to the project over its 16 years of on-off development, the overworked, lifeless result should be no surprise. I suppose at least we were spared the Mark Wahlberg version.
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