54901: The Crow

In May of 1994, I was 15 years old, so it was a HUGE moment for me when I walked up to the box office at Robinson Crossing AMC in Norman, Oklahoma, and purchased a ticket to see The Crow. You see, The Crow was rated R, and deservedly so, which meant I could not see it without a parent or guardian. Still, I was able to purchase a ticket from the 16 year-old working the cash register, and no one stopped me as I strolled in, took my seat, and had my mind absolutely blown by the world Alex Proyas built and all the impossible things Brandon Lee did within it. I truly wish someone had stopped me before I walked in to see the recent remake, from director Rupert Sanders and star Bill Skarsgård.

I really wanted to like this movie, and I  tried my damndest to judge it on its own merit, and not against the 1994 version. I really, really did. But this The Crow thoroughly thwarted me at practically every step. This movie shouldn't have happened. The Crow (2024) is boring. It's weighed down by a convoluted plot with needless (and vague) lore thrown at the audience, a villain with unclear motives, and a leaden performance from Skarsgård, who is a much better actor than what we see here.

Don't see this movie. Just don't. Go re-watch the original, even Beetlejuice for a better goth ghost flick than this one. Or check out Mr. Skarsgård in Barbarian or It, because The Crow (2024) is not worth your time. If you'd like for me to elaborate, please read on.

Beginning with ‎James O'Barr's landmark comic series and continuing in the 1994 movie, The Crow is a story of love and revenge. O'Barr wrote the story as a way to work through the grief over the death of his real-life fiancée, who was killed by a drunk driver. He turned his pain and loss and rage into the story of Eric Draven, a relentless, revenant force, focused on exacting revenge upon the men who took his life and the life of his love, Shelly. Draven hunts them down, steadily working his way to the big boss behind all the evil. He is haunted by memories of his lost love, and struggles to extricate himself from their grip long enough to carry out his vengeance. The tug of war between grief and rage makes the character work, and provides his narrative arc (which is more than most dead characters get).

Rupert Sanders, armed with a screenplay by Zach Baylin and William Schneider, seems to think that this story lacks enough shiny objects and won't be able to hold an audience's attention (never mind the fact that the original film is a classic and the comic has been a perennial favorite among readers for 35 years). So, Sanders heaps on stuff with reckless abandon. Shelly is now a musical prodigy who has hidden a MacGuffin of a cellphone with some sort of incriminating video that would be very damaging to a shadowy, big boss type villain. Eric is a lifeless mental patient who may or may not have burned his mother alive for letting a horse get stuck on a barbed wire fence (I'm not making up a word of that sentence) and he's got more tattoos than the entire Russian mafia.

Oh, and the big boss is now a centuries-old wizard (maybe?) who made a deal with the devil to send innocent souls to hell by whispering creepy shit into their ears and making them kill themselves, and he's got a major culture boner for classical music. Almost forgot! There's also a magical dude named Kronos, who lives in a mystical train station between worlds, and exists solely to explain to Eric that he should avenge Shelly's death and that as long as he loves her with a pure heart he's invincible. It boggles my mind that this project has been in development since 2008, passed through how many sets of hands and eyes, and this is what eventually came of it. How many people had to look at that script, and decide that telling this story warranted a $50 million budget? Hubris.

Now, given all the drastic mistakes made by Sanders, Baylin, and Schneider, they do try to do a couple of interesting things. Unlike the original, the new version spends a long time letting us get to know Eric and Shelly as living people falling in love. A long time. Perhaps, too long, given the lack of chemistry between Skarsgård and FKA Twigs. Part of the problem is that they meet and fall in love immediately, like in a borderline personality disorder plus codependence equals no future kind of way. It makes sense, given that we meet Eric while he is going through in-patient psychiatric care, but it also kind of puts a caveat on their love. Like, maybe in a week it's all gonna blow up anyway, even if an evil gang doesn't murder them? In the original film, we meet Eric and Shelly deep into their relationship. They have a home together. They're engaged. They have plans. They're functional, rational, young adults, with an emotional bond built over time, not over the weekend.

The filmmakers also tried to make this Shelly a richer, more complete character, rather than just a dead girlfriend who exists only as a memory to motivate the hero. I say "tried," because it didn't really work. They managed to make Shelly complicated, but never really give a sense of who she is, other than a few vague hints at her childhood and her sadness over something bad that she did.

Then there's the pacing. Maybe you're thinking, "hey, with all this extra bloat, surely the new The Crow has an enormously long running time!" To that, I would say, "it only feels like an enormously long running time." In fact, The Crow (2024) is only about ten minutes longer than the original, clocking in at 111 minutes. The film saves time, versus the original, by streamlining Eric's hunt for the bad guys. In the original, Eric searched the city, found clues, talked to people, etc., to push the plot forward. In 2024, it's much simpler. Instead of investigating, Eric just looks at the cell phone of whatever baddie he just killed and reads the conveniently timed text message from the dead guy's friend or boss with info about where they're supposed to meet up. That's it. Kill a guy, then *ding* he gets a text message with directions to the next action set piece.

Speaking of action set pieces, The Crow (2024) ruins them. All respect to Mr. Skarsgård, but he does not have the same grace and "wow" factor that Brandon Lee brought to the role. The action feels rote, perfunctory even. And thanks to Eric's invulnerability, there are zero stakes for his character. The bad guys don't try to run and hide, and they are utterly incapable of harming him. There's no hostage he has to rescue, no ticking clock he has to beat. There are zero stakes for him. He could stop and do the New York Times crossword before killing them all, and the result would be the same. It's just so boring, like watching someone play a videogame on God Mode. Who cares?

Lastly, let's talk about the ending. In this version of the story, Eric is promised by Kronos that he and Shelly will get to live again, if only Eric murders all the nasty folks who killed him and his love. Literally, they will be alive and together. Leaving aside the idea that if someone has that kind of power over life and death, they could probably just kill whoever they wanted to, are we really supposed to believe that Eric and Shelly will come back to life and, what, go pick out new furniture at Ikea and live happily ever after?

Well, it doesn't even matter, because for reasons too stupid to go into, Eric has to trade his life for Shelly's. The deal is that he'll stay but she will be alive. Star-crossed AF. Eric manages to live (so to speak) up to his end of the bargain, killing everyone he's supposed to, which means Shelly will be alive again! Except, she's already had a funeral. She's either in the dirt or in an urn. So, naturally, Kronos goes back in time and prevents her death. Keep in mind: her death is the inciting event for everything that Eric does as the Crow. Her death is the reason he kills all the people who were trying to kill her in the first place. Which means, unless she dies, he won't have a reason to do any of the things he has to do in order to bring her back to life. It is, without a doubt, the dumbest ending I've seen in a major motion picture in my lifetime. It is, essentially, telling us that nothing we watched really mattered. But perhaps the biggest middle finger the filmmakers raise to the audience is the fact that Eric is still kickin' around as the Crow, being all tortured and goth in the realm between worlds, biding his eternal time and waiting for a sequel to happen.

These assholes really think that after everything we just watched, we're going to be clamoring for more? Fuck off. Let this version of The Crow rest forever in the dirt, where it belongs.

[No, I won't be sharing a trailer for the film here. Fuck them, and fuck their engagement metrics. Instead, please enjoy this trailer for the original.]