From August 2017 – January 2020, Keith R.A. DeCandido took a weekly look at every live-action movie based on a superhero comic that had been made to date in the Superhero Movie Rewatch. He’s periodically revisited the feature to look back at new releases, as well as a few he missed the first time through.
The Crow was a cult hit in 1994, tapping near-perfectly into the Goth aesthetic of the 1990s. The movie also had a certain mystique about it due to tragedy: Brandon Lee, the son of Bruce Lee, was killed on-set by an improperly maintained prop gun firing blanks.
The movie spawned three sequels between 1996 and 2005, all of which followed pretty much the exact same plot as the original, but with a different person being resurrected to avenge his own murder (and that of the love of his life) by killing the four people responsible, one of whom would be impaled.
The idea of rebooting the franchise has been around since 2008, only three years after The Crow: Wicked Prayer. Said reboot has been in development for the entire decade-and-a-half since writer/director Stephen Norrington announced that he was doing a new adaptation of the original 1989 Crow comic book. Norrington left the project in 2011, and in the interim writers Nick Cave (a musician whose aesthetic is pretty close to that of the comic and movie), Jesse Wigutow, Cliff Dorfman, and James O’Barr (who created the original comic book); directors Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, F. Javier Gutiérrez, and Corin Hardy; and stars Mark Wahlberg, Bradley Cooper, Channing Tatum, Ryan Gosling, James McAvoy, Tom Hiddleston, Luke Evans, Jack Huston, Nicholas Hoult, Jack O’Connell, Alexander Skarsgård, and Jason Momoa were all attached to the film at various points. The notion was always to do a new adaptation of the comic, though Momoa’s departure from the project was reportedly due to the script he was working with moving away from the comic and being more of a rewrite of the 1994 movie.
In the end, Alexander Skarsgård’s brother Bill wound up in the title role, with Zach Baylin writing and Rupert Sanders directing. It took another two years for the film to get made, and indeed Danny Huston (Jack’s father) was initially cast as Roeg, the bad guy, had to drop out due to other commitments, then was recast when delays in production meant he had time again. (Huston previously appeared in this rewatch in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the 2017 Wonder Woman.) Rapper FKA Twigs plays the ill-fated Shelly, with the rest of the cast including Josette Simon, Laura Birn, Sami Bouajila (who gives pretty much the only good performance in the whole film), Isabella Wei, and Jordan Bolger.
The movie was bad-mouthed by pretty much everyone involved with the 1994 film—director Alex Proyas and stars Rochelle Davis, Ernie Hudson, and Tony Todd all expressed some manner of displeasure with a remake of the original story, with most thinking it disrespectful to Lee’s memory. It was also badmouthed by most critics and ignored by most viewers, as it was a box-office and critical flop.
The Crow
Written by Zach Baylin and William Schneider
Directed by Rupert Sanders
Produced by Edward R. Pressman, Molly Hassell, John Jencks, Victor Hadida, Samuel Hadida
Original release date: August 23, 2024
“Do you think angsty teens will build little shrines for us?”
We open with a little boy walking home through muddy roads from the grocery store, only to find a white horse, presumably his, that is down, wrapped in bits of barbed wire. The boy tries to remove the barbed wire, but only succeeds in slicing open his palms. The horse dies. This turns out to be a dream by the grown-up version of the boy, whom we will eventually learn is named Eric.
Cut to Shelly, who is awakened by a phone call from her friend Zadie, who has sent her a video. The existence of this video scares the crap out of both of them. Zadie says she’s being followed and Shelly probably is, too. Zadie is captured by the people following her and hangs up. Shelly tries and fails to call her back and leaves a message saying she’s going to find Dom. Then she puts her phone in a safe hidden behind a piece of furniture.
Shelly is also being followed, but before the bad guys can nab her, she literally bumps into two cops. Her purse falls open to reveal a large number of illegal narcotics, and she’s arrested.
She winds up in a rehab center, where she meets Eric. Over an indeterminate period of time (hours? days? weeks? it’s not clear…), they become smitten with each other. Shelly refuses to say why she’s in rehab, though, as she’s worried that Eric will stop loving her.
Zadie, meanwhile, is brought by a woman named Marion to Mr. Roeg, who is a wealthy music connoisseur (we see him mentoring a piano prodigy throughout the movie). Roeg confronts a frightened Zadie, saying that he has to keep providing innocent souls in order to maintain his immortality. He then whispers demonic words into her ear. Her eyes go blank and she stabs herself to death.
When Shelly gets visitors, she’s horrified to see that it’s Marion and her mother, along with some thugs. Eric sees how frightened she is, and offers to get away. They cut off their ankle monitors and leave through a window in the laundry room, thus effecting the world’s easiest and least convincing escape.
They return to the apartment where we first saw Shelly, which turns out to belong to a friend who lets her crash there when he’s away in Europe. The pair of them frolic and fuck and have fun and go off on a trip to a lake with a bunch of people we’ve never seen before and will never see again, even though they all seem to be close friends of theirs, I guess?
After several times declaring their undying love for each other, they go to a club, where Shelly encounters Dom, who encourages her to get out of town. Shelly is freaked out and wants to go back to Eric’s place. This is the first we’ve heard of Eric even having a “place,” and one wonders how he paid rent on it when he was in rehab and why he hasn’t been re-arrested if that’s his address.
Of course, Roeg’s people are waiting for them and kill them both.
Eric sees himself drowning, but also Shelly drowning and going further into darkness—then he winds up in a railyard that is some kind of purgatory-like place. A spirit guide named Kronos explains that he’s being given a new chance at life because he must stop Roeg. If he succeeds, he’ll be reunited with Shelly. He comes back to life and confronts a cop, who has already been established as being on Roeg’s payroll. The cop tries to kill Eric, but Eric can’t die, so Eric wins. Eric is rather impressed by his own new powers.
He goes to Shelly’s funeral and realizes that one of the women with Marion at the rehab center is her mother. Eric confronts her, and Mommy Dearest reveals that she sold her daughter’s soul for wealth. After Eric leaves, Roeg shows up, whispers demonic words in her ear, and she jumps out a window.
Eric tracks down some of Roeg’s thugs and kills them, and eventually finds Dom again. Dom explains that he, Zadie, Shelly, and some others used to party with Roeg because he had the good drugs. He mentions the video, and that it’s on Shelly’s phone. Eric goes back to the friend’s apartment, and finds the hiding place with the phone and the video. It shows Roeg whispering into Shelly’s ear, Shelley’s eyes going blank, and Shelly killing one of the other partygoers. Eric is horrified and starts to doubt his love for Shelly. He goes to the apartment of a friend we’ve never seen before and says he isn’t sure what to do. Three of Roeg’s thugs show up and shoot the friend and also Eric—who doesn’t heal. He stumbles into the bathroom, and falls into the bathtub, which is filled with water for no obvious reason. (The apartment’s resident was fully dressed and made no expression of an imminent bath before he was shot in the face.)
Finding himself back in purgatory, Kronos explains that Eric was eligible to sent back because his love for Shelly was pure. It’s not pure anymore. Eric offers to take her place in hell, and Kronos accepts that loophole, and then puts black gunk around his eyes that drips onto his cheekbones, so he can look more like the comic book character.
He reappears in his friend’s bathtub and kills the thugs. One sent a text to Marion after Eric died (but before he resurrected himself) apologizing for killing him, with a reply from Marion to meet at the opera. Eric sees the text exchange and heads to the opera house. While the opera is playing, Eric violently kills every single one of Roeg’s thugs who is present. He saves Marion and one other toady for last, decapitating each of them. As the opera ends, Eric walks onto the stage and holds up both heads, which causes a panic and everyone to run for the exits.
Despite the fact that a huge crowd of people just ran into an opera house lobby full of bloody corpses, Eric walks out of the opera house and down the stairs with nobody visible anywhere remotely around him. (I guess they couldn’t afford the extras for the exterior sets.) Before he beheaded Marion she explained that Roeg was at his estate. Eric drives there and has a ridiculous fight with him that ends with Roeg descending into hell. Shelly comes back up, has a brief reunion with Eric in purgatory, then he descends while Shelly comes back to life—
—in Eric’s apartment, having been revived by a paramedic who looks just like Kronos. Apparently she’s been retconned into life, though it’s not at all clear what happened to Roeg and the others who were killed after this. She goes on to have a great music career and live happily ever after. Or something.
“You have no love left, only hate”
The one good thing I can say about this movie is that it finally broke the formula that the other quartet of movies followed where four bad guys have to be killed, one of them impaled, before the confrontation with the Final Boss.
But the compliments end there. Casting one of the lesser Skarsgårds in the title role is a step down from Brandon Lee, Vincent Perez, Eric Mabius, and Edward Furlong in the other movies (not to mention Marc Dacascos in the TV series The Crow: Stairway to Heaven), as is casting the ever-bland Danny Huston as Roeg, who is similarly a step down from Richard Brooks and Fred Ward, and a step sideways from Michael Wincott and David Boreanaz.
However, even if they’d cast the best actors ever, they’d be done in by the horrible script. The first mistake they make is showing the development of the love affair, which puts way too much of a burden on both the writer and the actors. It’s much easier (and simpler and more convincing) to start with the happy couple already being together and happy and stuff, a lesson that all four other movies and the TV show understood.
Sadly, Skarsgård and FKA Twigs collapsed under that burden. I didn’t buy for a nanosecond that these two went from noticing each other in the midst of a rehab facility to being each others’ one twue wuv in so speedy a time.
Though, as I indicated in the plot summary, how much time it was is unclear. Not that the timeline makes any sense anywhere in the movie. Supposedly Shelly was sent to rehab after having some drugs in her purse. That’s a process that would take some time, and would be likely part of the public record and definitely accessible by a detective on the police force. So why did it take so long for Roeg to send Marion and Shelly’s Mom to the rehab center when we know they have a cop on the payroll?
And if it’s so easy to escape the rehab center, why didn’t more people do it? Also, why is it so easy to escape the rehab center? And why, in an era of traffic cams, security cameras, cell phones, and social media, was it so hard to track Eric and Shelly down once they got out? Especially since they apparently hung out with their friends (whoever they were; seriously, they just go to a lake with these people and we’re never given the first clue who the hell they are) and spent at least some time in Eric’s place.
That’s hardly the only question watching this movie prompts.
Who’s the piano prodigy? Why is she even in the movie? She plays no role in it except to look confused and play the piano a few times.
Who’s Eric’s friend who gets shot in the head and who apparently keeps a full bathtub for no reason? Why is he even in the movie?
How does nobody in the opera house hear all the gunfire in the hallway? You expect me to believe that nobody went to the bathroom the entire time? And where’s the opera house staff?
And the biggest question of all: why on Earth am I watching this movie? (My answer for that is that this feature endeavors to be complete. You, dear reader, have no such reason and can safely avoid this nonsense.)
Visually, the movie is dark and bloody. The fight choreography is adequate, the special effects approach convincing, and there’s a very appropriate soundtrack. I was amused that all the trained thugs who shoot at Eric in the opera house keep shooting him in the right and left shoulder constantly so Eric can shimmy back and forth as he’s shot every time…
We’re taking a pause for the holidays, but we’ll be back on the 8th of January with a gander at Joker: Folie à Deux. Hope you all have a wonderful holiday and a happy new year!
