Jonah Naplan   August 24, 2024

Rupert Sanders’ “The Crow” had so much thematic potential that it’s aggravating to see how little it capitalizes on its excellent aural and visual atmosphere and how much it dwells on less effective features. The movie is the finite product of 15 years of development hell that at different points involved Mark Wahlberg, Bradley Cooper, James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult, and Jason Momoa as potential stars and then finally casted Bill Skarsgård as comic book legend Eric Draven and selected Sanders as director. As such, the movie feels severely fragmented in its weakest sections, in desperate need of a real narrative structure that doesn’t just rely on scenes of shocking violence and explicit sex to scoot the plot along. If you couldn’t already tell, “The Crow” derives most of its power (or what it thinks is its power) from being as completely excessive and R-rated as possible before losing sight of its own more sophisticated personality. It ultimately ends up an imitation of itself that keeps blowing its shot instead of a physically or emotionally powerful film with something important or, at the very least, intriguing to say.

Arriving exactly thirty years after the 1994 original, a beloved cult classic that starred Brandon Lee who tragically died while on set, this “Crow” writes itself as a gothic-noir revenge thriller starring Skarsgård as an Old Testament killing machine who metes out punishment to seedy evildoers. The guy is out for revenge on those who murdered him and his lover (their relationship could be described as “freaky”) Shelly (FKA Twigs) under the orders of a vindictive crime boss named Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston). Eric’s journey down to Hell and back again is, on paper, a fascinating one physically and spiritually. He’s an angel of death bidding to regain his life. Essentially, a Hermes-esque character pledges that if he murders those responsible for Shelly’s death, she’ll be brought back to the mortal world. He doesn’t take this task lightly.

“The Crow” is a very different kind of comic book movie than anything we’ve ever seen come out of Marvel or DC. It’s dark, and gritty, and unforgiving. The violence it presents to us seems to be the result of a lack of options. Sanders, working from a screenplay by Will Schneider and Zach Baylin, creates an eerie and exotic atmosphere that plays with our neuroses to haunting effect. It’s the best part of the whole movie and a handful of montages interspersed throughout the runtime display how great “The Crow” could have been had it leaned more into turning the city of Detroit into a living, breathing character. Instead, the film focuses on a bevy of revenge thriller clichés that you might find in one of those Jason Statham “unstoppable machine” movies like “The Beekeeper” or “Wrath of Man” or a John Woo-directed action vehicle (“Silent Night,” in particular, finds inherent similarity with a protagonist that doesn’t speak much after the movie’s turning point).

It’s disappointing because I can imagine a badass version of “The Crow” that capitalizes on the idea of a John Wick with spectral immortality. Otherwise, here we have a movie that takes minimal creative risks in regard to its basic plot machinations: man and woman are happy, woman is killed, man is offered deal to get woman back, man starts killing. There’s little nuance to be found within this linear structure, and there’s far less narrative acuity when you step back and realize all the steps that had to be taken over the course of nearly two decades just for this film to lack all innovation.

Above all, I did manage to find myself somewhat invested in the romance at the film’s center even if it’s one that’s really not all that sincere or emotionally calibrated to feel personal and human instead of just emblematic of sex and vanity. Both performances get the job done, but that’s about it. Skarsgård broods around in various faces of melancholy, while Twigs is given relatively short screentime save for a couple of flashbacks and nightmarish hallucinations. In the select moments that they do share the screen together, the two actors have a chemistry stronger than either one of their individual performances. Their combined gothic energy can be intoxicating in scenes where the camerawork and editing as well as the score by Volker Bertelmann fuse to create a sort of merciless aura reminiscent of “Dark City” and “The Batman” (when Eric finally suits up in the third act to become The Crow, his makeup and madcap mannerisms echo the Joker in more than one regard).

I probably won’t be able to recount any notable action setpiece in “The Crow” a week from now, with the possible exception of a gorefest in an opera house that at least proves the filmmakers have no object for restraint, but one that will have moviegoers (myself included) wondering what the heck half of those guys did to deserve their horrible fates. All the violence in the movie is so insanely over-the-top with zero consideration for thoughtfulness or practicality. It’s big and ugly, making the “Deadpool” franchise look tame by comparison. Most of it is excessive and unnecessary, used only to shock us, perched on the edge of our seats, unnerved by the threat of whatever’s next.

This isn’t real suspense. It’s a forced reaction that the movie begs us to have. To an extent, we don’t mind that much because there’s parts of the film that are genuinely riveting, but at the same time we wonder that since the filmmakers have proven they are competent enough to create some good stuff, why not run the gamut and make the whole movie really good? The bleakness is all nailed down, its inhabitants want to occupy it stylishly, but the filmmakers have the characters and events tied to strings and are using them like ill-willed puppets who work as agents of destruction, both to the world and the success of this movie. “The Crow” talks a big game then realizes it can’t speak.

Now playing in theaters.