Soulmates Eric and Shelly 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 r...
Do you have any idea how dirty it feels to buy a ticket, never mind that it’s free, to watch “The Crow” remake? Brandon Lee’s tragic death linked to the original film is common knowledge at this point and putting aside how fun the original was, that should’ve been a warning for any film to stay away from remaking it. But of course, money talks and it doesn’t bother doing the walk because once again….
….abashed the devil stood and felt how truly frustrating this remake was.
Rupert Sanders, on paper, seems ok for this type of film, as he is a more visual director than most and The Crow films are practically baked in style over substance. But his workmanlike approach feels very trivial, remedial and lacking of a distinct personality to help it stand out. Had Sander's envisioned his version with a similar hyper-stylization, perhaps the film would have packed a more equal punch.
Doing away with the gothic iconography that gave the original such a tantalizing feel was a puzzling choice but they do try to make up for it to middling results. You can tell there’s something of a visual language in this neo-noir-esque production design but it’s so drab, so terminally middle of the road when you compare the look of sets and lighting of this to other Crow films. Filming this in Prague brings an element of interest with some previously unseen locales but nothing evocative or innovative came out of most of these locations whatsoever with a few glaring exceptions and any shreds of gothic ambience desperately needed for this atmosphere are sorely missing. It feels less like a comic book and more like a music video with brief spurts here and there accompanied by some of the most inconsistent lighting you’ll see in a film.
Cinematography is simple yet stagnant in every strained frame of its delivery while the editing, in particular, if not haphazardly put together, keeps giving away just how much content they had to cut out or switch around. It betrays how lopsided the mood and tone is set up as opposed to how it’s carried out further escalated by the poor pacing and sluggish momentum and the costumes aren’t worth writing home about. It did take a while to get used to the musical score actually being decent but the actual soundtrack choices from Joy Division to Enya to try to mimic the lightning in a bottle musical style of the first film don’t feel organic or in service of the story, like they deliberately chose the most moody music possible without looking for the significance behind them. And as purposefully sloppy and poorly choreographed as the action sequences are, they still make up the best part of the movie by default.
At the very least, keeping the R rating was the best choice they could’ve made for this, hands down. The blood is a little too CG heavy for my liking (hell, most of the CG in general isn’t) but this carnage-candy was what I expected going into a Crow film.
In stark contrast to the original, NONE of the characters stand out this time and the acting is stilted from all angles with unnatural dialogue to boot. Danny Huston’s playing the same villain role he’s been doing for decades and while Bill Skarsgard does his damndest to make his Eric Draven work, he can’t pull it off, not just because he looks like a budget store Post Malone that gangbanged Jared Leto’s Joker but he’s stripped of any identifiable or relatable characteristics.
Normally for projects like this, I say something along the lines of “This film’s concept had more potential than it probably needed to work but the execution of the story lets it all down”. I’m…..really inclined to say the same for this one but the alternate side of the matter I have to grasp is how deeply frustrating and confused this entire narrative was to process. From convoluted rules that gradually rip apart the simplicity and lore of the original, the vague worldbuilding that adds little to the films ambience, the constant plot points that just go unexplained for no reason and taking SO LONG for Eric to even become the Crow, it’s yet another example of “Why break something that doesn’t need to be broken?” I don’t fault it for being confident in its identity while trying to do things on its own terms but because it doesn’t know what it wants “its own terms” to be, so much of this story’s methods are rendered moot.
Take the love story for example: putting aside how Eric and Shelly in the original feel more goody two-shoes in the original despite the little nuggets dropped, the tragedy surrounding them is the fact they weren’t explicitly targeted; they were random victims of degenerate criminals. Their love was illustrated through the lens of a minimalistic approach, capturing the audience's emotions without unnecessary exposition. Giving each of them background stories and motives here to flesh them out is well-appreciated in my book but this movie fumbles SO HARD to get us to believe in the love they share for each other, partially because Bill and FKA hardly share any chemistry together, but mostly due to the timeline being a discombobulated fustercluck. Vital clarity is muddled at best as it’s difficult to grasp a hold of how much time passes here and that’s especially problematic when you’re trying to be supposedly resonant in every shot, without any credible emotional foundation.
Look, I understand why they make certain decisions here: they needed to put Eric in a position, physically and mentally, where he’d have to question the love he shared for Shelley before reaffirming to himself that this is what he wanted, that this is something worth fighting for. Pain is what gave The Crow meaning in the first place but because death and trauma is so mutable here, the initial frustration and sadness we’re meant to feel at meaningless violence in the world is lost and thus completely nullifies any and all stakes it sets up for later.
It’s change for the sake of change and while such ideas might’ve worked with a different Crow or much more polish behind the scenes, the suffocatingly tight focus barely leaves any room for us to follow the story or question the logic behind its goofy monster-of-the-week fantasy set-up or the hazy sense of cheapness that follows the plot everywhere like a lingering shadow.
The one quote from the original that stuck out to me the most while watching this reboot was “It can’t rain all the time”. And Brandon, in a way, was right: this is just another Crow movie destined to come and go just as quickly as it came…..and a part of that annoys me because you can see the snippets of potential it could’ve lived up to had everything not been so homogenized, picked apart and butchered in the editing room.
This poor birds wings were plucked before it could even take flight.
