The Doctor’s Diagnosis: F
I seem to be in the minority on this, but I am not, in principle, opposed to the idea of a new Crow movie. Yes, the original movie is intrinsically and tragically tied to Brandon Lee’s legacy. However, one must consider two things: First, there have already been three terrible Crow sequels, so it’s not as if Hollywood treated this property with any reverence after Lee’s death. Second, the concept of The Crow is extremely versatile. You could place a Crow story anywhere in the world and at any point in history and it would make sense. The Predator series finally learned this lesson with Prey; you can drop a predator into any location or timeframe, it doesn’t have to be the same shit over and over.
What you shouldn’t do with The Crow is remake the story of Eric Draven and that’s exactly what this abomination attempts to do. The filmmakers and stars of the new Crow have repeatedly tried to sell the idea that this isn’t a remake, which is horseshit. This is the story of Eric and Shelly again, just altered in completely baffling ways that remove any semblance of what made the original movie work. I assume the claims that “this isn’t a remake” are being made in a desperate attempt to avoid comparisons with the original now that the filmmakers have realized that this was a big mistake. Not that it particularly matters, as the new Crow would be a fucking terrible movie even if the Brandon Lee version didn’t exist. But the unavoidable comparison with the 1994 movie makes it something worse than terrible: completely soulless.
The core of The Crow is a love story. In the original movie, it is a love story that we barely see. The film begins after the brutal attack on Eric and Shelly that leaves Eric dead and Shelly clinging to life before finally succumbing to her injuries and trauma. Their relationship is only briefly glimpsed in flashbacks as we see them as a young couple, in love with each other and with their whole lives ahead of them. Despite the limited screentime devoted to their relationship, it is believable and casts a tragic spectre on subsequent events. I completely believe that that version of Eric was chosen to return from the grave to set the wrong things right.
In the 2024 version, I don’t believe any of this for a fucking second. I don’t give a shit about this couple and I don’t buy that the crow would bother resurrecting this schmuck. In this version, Eric and Shelly are drug addicts that meet in, I don’t know, a prison or maybe a rehab facility? I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it’s co-ed, the inmates wear pink jumpsuits and they all stand around in circles talking about their feelings. Maybe this is a preview of what prisons will be like when they are run by Gen-Z. Anyway, they fall in love for no particular reason and decide to escape (hilariously, despite wearing their inmate uniforms and standing in front of the prison, they easily waive down the first passing car and get a ride). This is no longer a timeless love story; it’s about two dipshit junkies having a fling that would eventually result in a divorce and them arguing over who gets to keep their sweet Honda Civic.
Shelly also has a video on her phone that incriminates a crime lord, so the mob is now after them. Now, anytime I’ve ever been on the run from the mob, I’ve gone to hide in a place where nobody would ever look for me (like a vegan restaurant). These assclowns go right back to the city and shack up at the home of one of Shelly’s friends (or her mom, can’t remember which). The bad guys find them quite easily and kill them in the most anticlimactic way possible. In the original, the attack is horrific even though we only see glimpses of it and hear descriptions of what Shelly is put through. Here, they are quickly suffocated with plastic bags, even though their hands are free when this is happening and they could easily just reach up and poke a hole in the bag. Honestly, these people deserve to die. Fuck ‘em.
It’s worth noting that, unlike the original, this version is primarily linear. Or at least I think it is. The editing in this is so odd that it can be hard to tell if something is meant to be in the past or the present. Unlike the flashbacks in the original, which are shown in a distinct style from the current events, we are often just kind of shown things occurring and left to decide what the fuck it has to do with anything else. For example, the movie opens with a pretentious scene of young Eric finding a horse stuck in barbed wire before the movie cuts to the opening credits. I mention this because it has fuck all to do with the rest of the movie. It would be like if Batman Begins opened with a scene of Bruce solemnly staring at an injured duck in a pond before cutting to the bats forming the logo.
With the movie taking a primarily linear structure, that means that we also spend a lot of time with Eric and Shelly before they are killed. And I mean a lot of time. They aren’t killed until around the halfway point of the movie, with the first half painfully trying to build up their relationship. This is agonizing because the love story has no credibility and both characters are completely unsympathetic. With all of his dumbass face tattoos, Eric looks more like Jared Leto’s Joker than he does The Crow (and you are already batting from well behind in the count if you make me think of Leto’s Joker) and Bill Skarsgård plays him as a mopey douchebag. Shelly is a manic pixie dream girl crossed with a heroin addict that speaks as if she’s constantly quoting shitty pop lyrics but thinks they are words of great philosophical importance. Fittingly, she’s played by an actress that actually calls herself FKA Twigs and, with a name like that, I have to assume she’s a terrible popstar or rapper that teenagers refer to as an “artist.” By the time the bad guys finally show up, you will breathe a sigh of relief that finally, finally, you get to see these two get murdered.
At this point, we still don’t get to see Eric go into vengeance mode. No, we get to watch the resurrected Eric mope around like the shiftless fuck that he is and become convinced that he should seek revenge. Yeah, he doesn’t even go after the bad guys right away, he needs some convincing because he’s a fucking pussy. So he dicks around in the afterlife, going into a purgatory-like realm and meeting a guy that acts as some sort of guide (this is the movie’s sad replacement for the Skull Cowboy character; see explanatory note below). This dude tries to explain the rules and situation of what’s happening, and I didn’t really follow it. Apparently now Eric needs to swap his soul to save Shelly from hell or something. In short, this was a lot more straightforward in the original.
Explanatory note: In the comic book, the Skull Cowboy is a character that appears when the crow brings someone back to life to explain the situation and act as a guide. The character was supposed to be in the 1994 movie (and you can find still shots of him), but the Skull Cowboy scenes were the majority of what still needed to be filmed when Brandon Lee tragically died and the character was cut from the film. He looked awesome and exactly as implied by the name: the rotting corpse of an old cowboy. In this movie, he is just some normal guy. Riveting.
Eric finally, fucking finally, decides to avenge his dead girlfriend in the last act and the movie momentarily picks up. There is one great, blood-soaked action sequence in an opera house, as he John Wicks his way through a horde of henchmen with a katana sword (which is a nod to the comic). I almost promoted this movie to a D- because of this sequence alone, but the action here isn’t earned and feels completely disconnected from the rest of the movie. Also, the nameless henchmen come out of nowhere as anonymous cannon fodder and completely lack the character of the villains in the original. There certainly isn’t anyone as memorable as Tin Tin or Funboy or T-Bird here. Hell, I still remember those characters’ names and I haven’t watched the original movie in years. I don’t know if the guys in this version even have names.
Speaking of villains, remember how the villain in the original was a slumlord crime boss that killed Eric and Shelly for protesting rent increases? Well fuck that sense of grounded, inner-city crime. Here, the villain literally has a pact with the devil and sucks the souls out of people. He feels like a lame villain-of-the-week character from an episode of Buffy or Supernatural or something. All of the grit and grime of the original is replaced here with the aesthetics of a CW television series from the early 2000s.
I didn’t expect this to turn into the longest review I’ve ever written, but goddamn did I hate this movie. This isn’t quite the worst remake ever; if anything ever takes that crown from the 2019 Black Christmas, then I might have to just stop watching movies. But it comes damn close. The original Crow is far from a perfect movie. The visual effects were shoddy even in 1994, some of the supporting performances were stiff and I can’t stand its use of the mystical Asian lady trope. But it has memorable characters, it has heart and it damn sure had style. This version has absolutely none of that. Everybody associated with this should be ashamed of themselves.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crow_(2024_film)#/media/File:The_Crow_2024.jpeg
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