REVIEW: The Crow (2024)

Crow

Finally released from development hell, Rupert Sanders’ The Crow feels tailor-made for Netflix.

Its gritty, “realistic” visuals and its try-hard Hot Topic aesthetic have all the genuine edge of a safety razor. Gone is the brooding Gothic camp of the original, replaced with… very little.

Bill Skarsgård’s tortured artist Eric is a lanky emo Ken doll whose two essential modes are “gormless” (in love) and “anguished” (doing revenge). FKA Twigs’ performance is a touch more modulated as soon-to-be-fridged soulmate Shelly – sad little smirks abound – but the film mistakes being pretty for their having chemistry. Much of The Crow‘s 111-minute runtime seems to be spent with them staring at each other’s hands in wonderment while lying around shabby chic apartments.

The baddies who ruin their nascent happiness are not sadistic street thugs, as in Alex Proyas’ original adaptation of the comic, but rather in the employee of a mind-controlling magnate (Danny Huston, oleaginous menace), whose hobbies include classical music and damning innocent souls to Hell. There’s no class commentary in this (Shelly is comfortably affluent), or indeed commentary of any kind, just an excuse to go slightly upmarket on the action set pieces when they finally roll around.

Having been murdered alongside Shelly, Eric receives his murdering powers from a strange man in a mystical warehouse, like a derelict version of the train station purgatory from Harry Potter. That done, he sets about proving that all that Boy Kills World fight training didn’t go to waste. This mostly consists of Eric acting as a bullet sponge then doing something unpleasant to the firer of said bullet, usually with a Samurai sword. Beside from the occasional CGI corvid and a couple of gnarly special effects – when Eric heals, it’s like a spider is sewing up the wound – these sequences could have come from any mid-budget actioner this year.

The film’s editor and composer have both won Oscars (Chris Dickens for Slumdog Millionaire and Volker Bertelmann for 2022’s All Quiet on the Western Front, respectively), but you get the sense that this was a salvage job; indicated by the aforementioned pacing issues and the fact that filming was completed two years ago. It’s perfectly competently made; to my eyes not even disastrous enough to be interesting. For a film that was in production for so long that the two lead producers listed (Edward R. Pressman and Samuel Hadida) both died prior to release, nobody seems to have given it much thought.

The Crow is a reimagining without any imagination, a film that you’re brainstorming better versions of while exiting the cinema. What if Shelly was the protagonist? What if the protagonist was someone inspired by the original Crow (ooh, meta)? Their focus should have been less on eye-liner and more on the why-bother?

Wait for streaming, or better yet, rewatch the original.

Author: robertmwallis

Graduate of Royal Holloway and the London Film School. Founder of Of All The Film Sites; formerly Of All The Film Blogs. Formerly Film & TV Editor of The Metropolist and Official Sidekick at A Place to Hang Your Cape. Co-host of The Movie RobCast podcast (formerly Electric Shadows) and member of the Online Film Critics Society.

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