The Crow: The '90s Called, and They Want Their Bird Back

By John Kirk

Rating: C-minus

The ‘90s had its pop cultural lemons. But a bright spot, ironically, was a dark goth romance with incredible fight sequences, supernatural mystique, and vengeance that transcended the boundaries between Heaven and Hell.

That film was The Crow with Brandon Lee, and those attributes made this film a model of an early successful superhero movie.

That brings us to the less successful The Crow (2024). Those features were three ‘must-haves’ for this remake to be successful. Instead, it looks like the creators for this version threw out the core and substituted clumsy gore, a schmaltzier love story and treatment of the supernatural that’s too vague to follow or swallow.

Caught between the living and the dead, Bill Skarsgård seeks revenge over some girl he met.

Add (or subtract) dull dialogue, melodramatic over-acting and the profound absence of a kick-ass soundtrack that would have made this film a lot more palatable.

Here’s the official synopsis:

“Soulmates Eric Draven (Bill Skarsgård) and Shelly Webster (FKA twigs) are brutally murdered when the demons of her dark past catch up with them. Given the chance to save his true love by sacrificing himself, Eric sets out to seek merciless revenge on their killers, traversing the worlds of the living and the dead to put the wrong things right.” 

The demons that catch up with Shelly aren’t well identified. Maybe that’s because the film doesn’t really follow the premise of the original graphic novel by James O'Barr.  The romance between Eric and Shelly is difficult to accept because it’s one that is created and accelerated in the first act. Not only does that force the audience to quickly accept “true love,” but it slows things to a snail’s pace off the top.

This version sees Shelly and Eric as flawed characters who meet up in a rehabilitation facility. In the ’94 film and graphic novel, Eric and Shelly were a regular couple at the beginning of their lives together. The fact that they were brutally murdered is the reason for the vengeance that propels Eric to stay in this world and exact revenge in the name of love. We aren’t well-motivated to either invest in these new characters or to believe that their love is true.

Then there’s the ham-fisted approach to the supernatural. Their killers are after Shelly because she knows something about a wealthy aficionado of the arts, Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), though that isn’t made clear for some time. It’s clear that he’s somehow a supernatural entity but again, what he is, we have no idea. The hints about both his and Eric’s origins are too obscure and never fully answered for the audience to relate to.

I hate to be that superhero geek who points out the flaws in powers and superheroes, but how Eric manages to traverse the worlds of the living and the dead is supposed to be connected to the crow that guides him to the killers to establish balance. Remember: the crow is supposed to be the source and secret of Eric’s abilities. However, if you watch carefully, you’ll notice that the crow just seems to show up where Eric goes. Who’s leading who?

Also, Eric has no fighting ability. Yes, he heals fast, because he’s dead, but the fight sequences aren’t entertaining. There’s no skill, or supernatural quickness – just a regenerative capability that seems to be lifted from Deadpool. There are some shock value moments, heavily stuffed with gore and blood, but these don’t sustain the film and just serve to point out how much the fighting relies on them. In short, Eric is an uninspiring superhero.

Speaking of uninspiring, the dialogue is awkwardly delivered as well. Short, forgettable, there are no heartfelt moments between the two lovers that are easily believed. The intimate moments are pure schmaltz, confirmed by the chuckles heard in the theatre at my screening. The dialogue between our hero and the villains he faces down is dull and anticlimactic. Boring, unbelievable and quite frankly, too forced, there are no reasons to accept these characters or their motivations.

Then there’s the music. Like the characters, the majority of the soundtrack isn’t memorable enough to make a difference. While there was one track that was slightly reminiscent of Echo and the Bunnymen (a Goth staple if there ever was one), the only other music that stood out was the operatic piece at the end of the film. While that definitely added some intensity to the end fight scene, we’re talking another five minutes of film that can’t make up for the other 105 minutes.

Sadly, this was a let-down. There was anguish depicted in the ’94 film and its source material that was born of a true sense of suffering and loss. Look up O’Barr’s story to see what I mean. There was none of that present in this film.

Forced and contrived, it makes one miss the ‘90s.

The Crow. Directed by: Rupert Sanders. Written by: Zach Baylin, and William Schneider. Stars Bill Skarsgård, FKA twigs, and Danny Huston. The Crow opens in theatres Friday, August 23rd.