If you are as big fan as I am of Alex Proyas’s 1994 cult classic The Crow, which starred Brandon Lee as the avenging black-winged angel Eric Draven, you’re probably going to have a difficult time finding something to salvage in Rupert Sanders’s 2024 update.
Boasting nearly double the original film’s budget, and featuring two big, beloved stars to boot, there’s an alternate universe where a filmmaker with a singular vision could mold the original concept (from James O’Barr’s graphic novels) into something specific and staggeringly modern.
Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in.
Bill Skarsgård and FKA twigs play star-crossed lovers Eric and Shelly, who are [spoiler alert, though you had to have seen this coming] brutally murdered when the demons of Shelly’s past catch up to them. Given a second chance at life and an opportunity to save his dear Shelly’s soul, Eric takes on the supernatural powers of The Crow, all in the moody emo spirit of putting things right.
Given that O’Barr’s original series featured a slew of different characters who took on the powers of The Crow, it’s hard to decipher exactly why the filmmakers zeroed in on just one protagonist. O’Barr’s stories are based on an Indigenous tale in which the spirit of The Crow is not tied to a specific person, but whoever has a soul that cries out for justice.
For instance, in the comic The Crow: Dead Time, a Native American farmer of the Crow Nation named Joshua Zane exacts revenge on a band of Confederate soldiers. In The Crow: Flesh and Blood, Iris Shaw, the first woman in the role, hunts down the ones responsible for taking her child, but is also unable to heal and must complete her mission before she withers away. (She uses a stapler to patch herself up; it doesn’t get much more metal than that.) Given so many options, another emo-dude version of The Crow feels like a missed opportunity.
As it is, The Crow’s protagonists are blandly uninteresting at best, downright unlikable at worst. Skarsgård’s Eric Draven is covered in tattoos of barbed wire, tragedy masks, and the words “Good Boy” with the “Good” crossed out. He has no backstory other than a vague flashback of a dying horse, and no interests other than writing down random words — which he admits are not necessarily poems, or songs, or much of anything. (Which likely is still better than William McGonagall.)
Eric’s love interest, FKA twigs’s Shelly, revels in trashing her friends’ pads while they’re out of town and stealing all of their drugs. Basically she’s a Good Girl with the word “Good” crossed out. The nogoodnik duo meet in rehab at the Serenity Park Recovery Center, their attraction blooming into an erratic (and relatively easily executed) escape plan, after which they join forces on the outside, fall in love, and mooch from their well-to-do slacker pals. As you do.
Together, they complain about their alleged grievances, generate gratuitous PDA, and trade cheesy, uninspired dialogue. At one point FKA twigs asks Skarsgård what kind of tea is hard to drink. When he tells her he doesn’t know, she jokes, “Reality.” (I half-expected her to follow up by asking him where bad rainbows go, then answering “To prism.”)
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet makes an apt comparison to The Crow, not as an eternal-devotion story, but as an over-the-top cautionary tale about the dangers of naive young people believing they’re in love with someone they just met 48 hours ago.
When Eric dies, we follow him to a Limbo of sorts — a rundown warehouse full of muddy puddles that the god (or angel or what-have-you older gentleman who hangs around in a trenchcoat) regularly Sparta-kicks Eric into whenever he returns to consciousness. Eric learns that he can retrieve Shelly’s soul from the flames of the underworld if he only can kill Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), who has welched on his own Faustian bargain. While the filmmakers clearly wanted to up the ante in this adaptation with such a literal inclusion of the devil, Eric’s ability to bring Shelly back to life means his revenge lacks potency. The Crow becomes less Avenging Angel and more Guy With Get-Out-of-Hell-Free Card.
Director Rupert Sanders and his production team fail to conjure atmosphere to compete with the original, as if cowed (or should I say, crowed) by such a fierce benchmark of 1990s culture. Alex Proyas’s 1994 entry is drowning in black leather jackets, Doc Martens, greasy hair and filthy villains, but Sanders doesn’t seem interested in distinctively reimagining his update. It’s not just bad world-building, it’s completely absent. Where are these characters? What year is it? Why does everyone have a different accent? Who are these villains? What makes them special? Why does each character dress like they raided closets linked to different time machines?
What even is the purpose of Eric’s crow? In the comics and the previous cinematic interpretations, The Crow doesn’t just follow his newly alive apprentices around, he guides them, he is their eyes, and they speak telepathically. For all that they do, the crows in this film might as well be silhouettes among Eric’s impressive tattoos.
Skarsgård, creepily askew as Pennywise in the recent It films, brings what charisma he can to the role, but ultimately doesn’t have much to work with. The only real saving grace of the movie is a brutal stairway fight in the third act. It’s still too little too late, and its exuberance inadvertently undermines the subsequent big-boss battle.
Proyas’s 1994 film was lightning in a bottle, never to be recaptured (rest in peace, Brandon Lee). Still, it would’ve been nice to see director Sanders actually give The Crow the old college try – which, alas, FKA twigs’s cheesy character would probably call the old caw!-ledge try.
