The Crow (2024) Assessment – ‘A turkey’

Launched in 1994, Alex Proyas’ The Crow turned a cult hit extra for the macabre mystique that surrounded it — its star, Brandon Lee, was tragically killed throughout manufacturing — than for its high quality. Immensely fashionable, however in any other case mediocre, it’s not shocking it was eyed for a remake. Its brooding, easy story of vengeance has a great deal of potential. This new model has, disappointingly, ported over all of the mediocrity — and added extra of its personal — however valuable little fashion.

In growth for over 15 years, The Crow’s producers have described this not as a remake, however fairly one other tackle James O’Barr’s Nineteen Eighties comedian. It’s neither, actually. It borrows a kernel of O’Barr’s thought, and the goth trappings and high-contrast look of Proyas’ movie, and jumbles them along with its personal poorly defined mythology.

In O’Barr’s telling, the Crow is created after a younger couple, Eric and Shelly, are murdered by road thugs. Eric is resurrected by a crow and, consumed by grief and fury, seeks bloody justice. Right here, we nonetheless get Eric and Shelly, performed by Invoice Skarsgård and FKA twigs, however they’re wrapped up in some kind of demonic plot with Vincent (Danny Huston), who has to maintain claiming harmless souls to fulfill, we should assume, Devil. We should assume, as a result of The Crow offers little motive as to why something’s taking place.

It bungles even probably the most fundamental storytelling. We’re launched to Eric in a pre-credits sequence displaying his childhood despair over a horse dying. That is all the reason we’re ever supplied as to why he, as an grownup, is in rehab and emotionally damaged. He’s introduced immediately again to life when Shelly, who’s on the run from Vincent’s evil minions as a result of she has a video that might “destroy him” (she by no means makes an attempt to), joins him in rehab. She’s drawn to Eric as a result of he appears “brilliantly damaged”, a line twigs delivers with the lightness of a child saying they like your unicorn pencil case. They escape of rehab and fall deeply, montage-ily in love.

This love, fashioned over a number of days, and in rehab, is, we’re instructed, so pure that when a horrible destiny befalls Eric and Shelly, Eric is obtainable the possibility of immortality to wreak revenge on their killers. The foundations of and motive for his particular remedy are, once more, ill-defined.

Rupert Sanders (Snow White And The Huntsman, Ghost In The Shell) has by no means proven himself to be an important storyteller, however he’s normally good for a little bit of visible oomph and occasional humour. However right here the temper is sullen and sluggish, the motion messy, and the look drab. It’s solely within the final 25 minutes, when Eric goes ‘full Crow’, that Sanders appears to be having any enjoyable with it. Eric fussing over the correct amount of eyeliner for his new identification might be extra camp than Sanders meant, however all the higher for it. And whereas a bloodbath in an opera home is spinoff — Mission: Unattainable – Rogue Nation meets John Wick — it’s low-cost, gory enjoyable. It’s not a lot, however after 70 minutes of tedium it’s welcome, a meagre little bit of sustenance to peck off this rotting carrion.