The Crow began life as a comic book by James O’Barr, then it became a cult classic film from 1994, starring the late Brandon Lee, Michael Wincott, Bai Ling, and Ernie Hudson, which was directed by Alex Proyas and was successful enough to spawn three sequels and a TV show. The 1994 film is also known for its generation-defining soundtrack featuring a who’s who of heavy metal and grunge, as well as composer Graeme Revell’s original score, which is one of the most influential film scores of the last fifty years. The Crow (1994) leaves big shoes to fill.
The new The Crow comes from director Rupert Sanders, best known for previous limp remakes Snow White and the Huntsman and Ghost in the Shell, and it’s written by Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider. It’s still based on James O’Barr’s comic in which the murdered Eric Draven comes back to avenge the death of his beloved with the help of a mystical crow, but the new adaptation features a number of alterations that range from head-scratching to infuriating. Of course, alterations probably felt necessary because the original film is so distinctive, but that was just another clue that no one needed to remake The Crow.
This time Eric Draven is played by Bill Skarsgård, and let’s be clear—none of this is his fault. Nor is any part of this mess FKA Twigs’ fault, or Danny Huston’s fault; for that matter, none of the crew who showed up and did their jobs are at fault, either. It takes hundreds of people to make a movie, but only a few to f-ck it up, and the cast is doing their best with the objectively bad material they were given, and some elements of the production, like the set decoration and costuming, are pretty good. All of the problems in The Crow stem from decisions made on a story level, and on a directorial level, such as photographing the whole film with a sickly grey-green tinge that was probably meant to convey decay, but really just makes the film look both dated and cheap.
About those story decisions, though, rather than just launching into the central conflict, the new The Crow takes fully one-third of the film to get going. We get to meet Eric Draven as a boy, devastated by the death of his horse (no jokes, horse girls and boys know you always have that one special horse you never forget). What IS dumb is that it seems like ten-plus years later, Eric is STILL haunted by his dead horse, to the extent that he’s been institutionalized. In that institution, Eric meets Shelly (FKA Twigs), who is there just to hide out from the evil Roeg (Danny Huston), who is trying to kill her because she took video of him doing “bad things”. Hey, remember when Eric and Shelly were murdered just because they were protesting evictions? Simpler times!
The Crow is torturously overworked, but all the narrative contortions do not make it feel fresh or newly interesting, it just feels torturously overworked (almost like they nailed it the first time!). Building off the mythological idea of crows as psychopomps that escort the recently dead to the afterlife, the new The Crow throws Eric and Shelly into a supernatural stand-off in which Roeg is an actual demon, and Eric is an Orphean figure fighting for a Eurydice he can never see again.
Framing The Crow as an Orphean myth isn’t a bad idea, in and of itself, but the execution here is just lame. Despite a forty-minute backstory for Eric and Shelly, they are a wildly uncompelling couple. Skarsgård and Twigs have some natural chemistry, but Sanders does not know how to harness it, nor does the script give them much of anything to do, and all of their dialogue is nonsense. Twigs has it the worst, despite the effort to turn Shelly into a fuller character—she spends most of the original movie dead—no one ever comes up with anything interesting for her to do. The Crow’s understanding of “young and crazy in love” feels like it comes from a person whose only concepts of “young” and “in love” are from watching episodes of Euphoria.
The film is hyperviolent, which is just another misunderstanding of the original The Crow, and also maybe John Wick. Yes, The Crow (1994) is violent, but the action in that film is mostly practical, built off the actual martial arts skills of star Brandon Lee (son of Bruce). In the new The Crow, Sanders goes to town with gory gun battles, but the action feels strangely light and airy, and definitely low stakes since not only can Eric not be killed—as he is technically dead—but they’ve also nixed the plot point that he can still feel pain. Skarsgård’s Eric takes brutal hits and just keeps on trucking with no sense of physical reality to what is happening on screen. It makes the finale action sequence feel especially weightless and unengaging.
It's frustrating to see talented actors wasted on such a bad script, and even more frustrating to see a film that holds up thirty years later reinvented and overworked for the betterment of nothing. The new The Crow is trying so hard to be its own thing, but all it really does is show you how good the original is. When threatened with a new adaptation of The Crow more than a decade ago, fans of The Crow said, “Please don’t.” Generally, no one should listen to fans, but for once, the fans were right. The Crow was best left undisturbed.
The Crow (2024) is now playing exclusively in theaters. The Crow (1994) is now streaming on Prime Video.
