JP Nunez
Remakes get a bad rap in the movie world, and understandably so. Sure, there are some great ones out there, like The Thing and Scarface, but more often than not, these films end up being pale imitations of their far superior originals. So naturally, this new remake of The Crow had an uphill battle from the start. It didn’t just have to be good. It had to justify its existence in a world where we already have the 1994 cult classic, and as any hardcore movie fan knows, that’s a pretty tall order.
The Crow was directed by Rupert Sanders, and it stars Bill Skarsgård, FKA Twigs, Danny Huston, and Sami Bouajila. This film deviates from the 1994 original (and, to my understanding, the original comic books, but I’ve never read them myself) in some surprising ways, but at its core, it tells the same basic story. A man named Eric meets and falls in love with Shelly, and they embark on a whirlwind romance.
Their lives seem just about perfect, but that all changes when Shelly’s past finally catches up to her. She’s murdered by a mysterious group of thugs, and when Eric sees what they’re doing, they kill him too. It’s an absolute tragedy, but it’s not the end for this storybook couple. Eric is given the chance to return from the dead and avenge his girlfriend’s death, and when he does, he finds that he has an almost Wolverine-esque healing factor.
As anybody who’s seen the original The Crow knows, that basic premise is more than enough to build a great movie around, but unfortunately, the execution just doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain. Let’s start with Eric and Shelly’s relationship. When it begins, it’s a typical Hollywood romance where two good-looking people meet and instantly fall head over heels for each other, and from there, it doesn’t get any better.
The Crow spends about 35 minutes developing this love story, but despite all that time, the film never made me believe that these people genuinely love each other. Sure, they like each other very much and have a lot of fun together, but that’s pretty much the extent of their relationship. It feels like they never get past the initial “honeymoon” phase, so Eric’s undying love for his girlfriend isn’t nearly as convincing as it needs to be.
That questionable foundation makes the entire story suspect, but it’s just the beginning of this movie’s woes. Take the villain, for instance. Shelly is murdered because she got involved with a crime lord named Roeg, and this guy is about as generic as they come. Even Danny Huston, a great actor who’s done fantastic genre work in the past, can’t make him interesting, and the more we learn about this character, the more yawn-inducing he becomes.
I don’t want to spoil any of the film’s horrible surprises, so I’ll just say that he’s not entirely of this world. This added supernatural bent is probably The Crow’s biggest departure from the 1994 original and the comic books (again, as I understand them), and for my money, it doesn’t work at all. Roeg’s backstory is lazy and unoriginal, and he has a special ability that’s eye-roll-inducingly lame.
Next, we have to talk about the action. This is the only thing about the movie that I actually liked, but don’t get your hopes up too much. As I said in my review of Borderlands a few weeks ago, action without a solid emotional foundation is just visual noise, and that’s exactly the case here as well.
On its own, the action in The Crow isn’t bad. It’s soaked with enough blood and gore to earn that R rating, and Bill Skarsgård proves once again that he’s a legit action star. There’s even a sequence in an opera house that I really enjoyed, but on the whole, my utter lack of concern or interest in these characters and their story made it totally meaningless. I just couldn’t care about what I was seeing on screen, and that’s always a huge bummer.
Last but not least, I’d be remiss if I didn’t say a few words about the new mythology in this version of The Crow. When Eric dies, we see him in the afterlife before he returns to earth, and much like Roeg’s added supernatural touch, this reimagining of the great beyond is also pretty bland and uninspired.
What’s more, the rules this time around seem to be different from the original movie, and to be frank, they’re a bit confusing. There are multiple instances of this throughout the film, but the worst comes when Eric finally turns into the unstoppable, face-paint-wearing superhero we remember from the ‘90s. Again, I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll just say that the mythology gets so muddy at this point that you almost think the characters are making things up on the spot.
To be fair, The Crow is far from the worst movie I’ve seen all year. Hell, it’s not even the worst film I’ve seen this month (that would be Borderlands), but it’s still pretty bad. Almost nothing about this remake works, and the one thing it does well is hit or miss at best. In fact, if I wasn’t reviewing the movie, I would’ve felt like I wasted my time seeing it, so unless you genuinely have nothing better to do with your life, I highly recommend skipping this film and watching just about anything else instead.
The Crow is playing in theaters right now.
