One of the first things you see in the remake of The Crow is a white horse lying in a muddy field, bleeding profusely after getting caught in barbed wire. It’s a metaphor, of course, and a pretty crude one at that – a powerful image that doesn’t really fit and is never explained.
That’s a hint that director Rupert Sanders is going for the stylish rather than the honest approach in this film. In his attempt to breathe new life into the iconic comic and film hero, he has given us a lot of beauty at the expense of depth or coherence.
The filmmakers set their story in a modern, generic Europe and made it very clear that the film is based on James O’Barr’s graphic novel, but the 1994 adaptation starring Brandon Lee hovers over it like, well, a stubborn crow.
Brandon, son of legendary actor and martial artist Bruce Lee, was only 28 when he died after being shot while filming a scene for The Crow. History seems to repeat itself: The new adaptation comes as shooting deaths on the set of Rust continue to make headlines.
Lee’s The Crow was completed without him, and he never lived to see the film, in all its rain-soaked gothic glory, etched into Generation X’s memory, influencing everything from alternative fashion to Blade to Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.
Bill Skarsgård takes over Lee’s role as Eric Draven, a man so in love that he returns from the dead to avenge his and his lover’s murder. I guess you could call it a kind of supernatural, romantic murderfest. (The tagline “True love never dies” is a clumsy rip-off of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera.)
Writers William Schneider and Zach Baylin have given the story an almost operatic facelift by introducing a devil, a Faustian pact, blood-on-blood oaths, and a godlike leader who oversees the space between heaven and hell, which looks like an abandoned, weed-covered train station. “Kill those who killed you and you’ll get them back,” our hero is told.
The first half drags, setting the stage for the steady severing of limbs and necks at the end. Eric and his love Shelly (played by an unlikely FKA Twigs) meet in a rehab prison for troubled youth that’s so well-lit and equipped it looks more like an airport lounge where cappuccinos cost $19 but the Wi-Fi is free.
Eric is a gentle loner – tormented by a past the writers don’t flesh out, fond of sketching in books (a universal cinema code indicating a sensitive soul) and heavily tattooed (he’s often shirtless). His apartment is filled with rows of mannequins with plastic heads and his new love calls him “brilliantly broken.” He’s like a Blink-182 lyric come to life.
Shelly is more complex, but that may be because the writers gave up on giving her a real backstory. She has a tattoo that says “laugh now, cry later,” reads serious literature, and likes to dance in her underwear. She obviously comes from a wealthy background and has had a falling out with her mother, but has also done an unimaginably horrible thing that viewers will learn about at the end.
Part of the problem is that the main couple lacks tension, offering a love story that is more juvenile than all-consuming. And that story needs a love that can transcend death.
There are plenty of cool-looking moments—especially Skarsgård in a trench coat, trudging through the desolate concrete jungle at night in the rain—until “The Crow” develops into one of the better action sequences of the year, albeit another one of those heightened operatic showdowns.
Meanwhile, Eric has donned the Crow’s heavy eye and cheek makeup. He adds a katana and the inability to die to this ensemble. As he approaches his target, mowing down the tuxedo-clad villains to arias, the group’s movements onstage are mirrored by the furious fighting backstage. A few severed heads might be considered over the top during the final applause, but subtlety is not praised here.
While the original was plot-light but visually a delight, the new film has a better story but suffers from the ideas of the films that built on its predecessor, stealing a bit from The Matrix, Joker and Kill Bill. Why not create something completely new?
The Crow isn’t bad – and keeps getting better – but it’s a piece of pure stupidity. It can’t escape Lee and the 1994 original, even as it builds a more allegorical framework for the smartphone generation. To use that very first metaphor, it’s like the imprisoned white horse – held down by its own painful past, never free to gallop under its own power.
