The Crow (2024)

 

I've never been the biggest fan of the original "The Crow" from 1994. It's a perfectly acceptable film, it's main attraction being the goth-like look of the city in decay that is haunted by the avenging spirit of Brandon Lee's character. The whole plot itself mostly consists of a revenge driven fantasy, which doesn't do much to build character, or make us loath the villains who are being given justice. It's a paint by numbers Vengeance film with a supernatural element to it. In that version of the film there is no explanation whatsoever as to why the character comes back from the dead. There is only some mumbo jumbo about crows leading the dead to the after world or back to this one if something is left undone. The impervious nature of Eric's body to weapons and punishment is clearly supernatural but not very clear as to why it is happening.

This version of the movie attempts to answer those questions and make the plot line conform to a more coherent structure. I'm not sure that that's completely necessary but I had a better understanding of what the hell was going on when watching this than I did with the original. That however is not enough to make this a good movie. The fact that we meet the hero and his lost love early in the film and spend some time understanding how they got together and what they mean to one another, does help a little bit, but it moves pretty slow and I'm not sure how much the audience really care about this. Apparently the whole plot that appears in this film concerning a minion of Satan using his powers on Earth to send innocent souls to hell is completely new with this screenplay. I didn't have any problem with this since it conforms to the other part of the story about why Eric comes back from the dead in the first place. It also makes the ultimate villain of the piece a little bit more interesting than in the previous film.

The slow moving first hour is not likely to endear this film to most viewers. A love story between two drug users, who break out of rehab and somehow managed to find an upscale apartment to stay in and unlimited resources to function with, is not really that appealing. The two characters are all right, with the female lead being more appealing than our main protagonist. There's a convoluted connection to the villain and why this young woman is being sent to hell and why Eric feels he must come back from the dead to try and save her. Blah blah blah.

I suspect what fans really want from a film like this, are the sequences where the hero makes the bad guys suffer for their sins. I know that's what I was sitting here waiting for. When it happens this film goes further in making the punishments seem harsher and more just, given what the criminals are responsible for. Eric doesn't seem so much like a righteous angel as he does an Angry Young Man who simply has an extraordinary power to survive deadly force. Apparently death also makes him an expert at using a sword and firing a gun. It doesn't matter how he got so good with those tools, all that matters is that he uses them and we get to see. So there are dismemberments, piercings, and face shooting galore at the start of the third act, and damn it that's what we've been waiting for.

Bill Skarsgårdis is in fact a perfectly acceptable replacement for Brandon Lee and the role of The Crow. He has a washed out hollow look, and the lanky frame of a drug user, who's still possesses a little bit of physical capability. He never comes across however as anything other than an angry man. There is very little depth to his mission, even when it appears that he has to accept a truly negative consequence in order to pursue it. Little thought has been put into whatever intellectual concepts might have been relevant in a revenge story of this type. Danny Houston is particularly reptilian as the minion of the evil one, who is trading the souls of hundreds of Innocence, for his continued existence on Earth. He seems to have some Supernatural persuasive voice, like some Hellbound Bene Gesserit, convincing the innocent to do something that will damn them. It's all a little fuzzy, as are most of the things in this story.

As I've already said, the main difference between this film and the previous iteration of "The Crow", is the look of the film. So much of this version occurs during daylight hours, maybe the skies are cloudy, but it is certainly not as dark is the 94 film was. The original Crow had the death of Brandon Lee hanging over it, which probably also accounts for its cult status. This version of the movie will probably not achieve that standard. I guess is it will be forgotten after this last weekend, in fact I nearly forgot that I had seen it myself.