The Crow (2024) review – Stuck between the living and the dead

The Crow’s return to cinemas has been a long time coming – quite the opposite, in fact, from how the bird flies. The 1994 film, based on the indie comic by James O’Barr, was a critical and commercial success, leading to three other entries (two of them straight to video) in the supernatural revenge anthology series, along with a TV show that lasted a single season. After 2005, though, the franchise slinked back to the grave, and various attempts to faithfully revisit the on-page source material, were unable to escape Development Hell. Not even with Jason Momoa attached to star.

Still, it turns out you can’t you can’t keep a heartbroken lover down, even when he’s been murdered. So, thirty years after the release of original filmic adaptation The Crow, there’s a new Eric (Bill Skarsgård) back from the dead, and dressed up in Goth mode to hunt down the thugs who deprived him and soulmate Shelly (FKA Twigs) of happiness. The weird thing is that it feels like very little time has passed at all, because The Crow (2024) has all the sensibilities of an “edgy” superhero film made in the late Nineties or early Noughties. Think Blade or Thomas Jane’s The Punisher. While it admirably keeps its CGI effect low-key, The Crow has a weird sense of cheapness. Adding to that, the film has been very clearly shot, at least in part, in Eastern Europe.

Even if Nineties teens remove their rosy nostalgia lenses (or welding goggles), Alex Proyas’s The Crow remains an example of a hyper-stylised comic book adaptation. The new Crow, under the direction of Rupert Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman, Ghost in the Shell) goes the gritty, grounded route, but develops an identity crisis in the process.

Because you can’t spend literally half your film building up a star-crossed love story between young rebels and then force-feeding a katana to multiple goons in an opera house. The latter is the film’s climactic action sequence, and is so overblown in its violence that you could be watching the opening credits of Deadpool & Wolverine again. Except, in The Crow’s case, it’s deadly serious.

That really is The Crow’s biggest problem. It’s straining to be supposedly resonant in every shot, without any credible emotional foundation. It’s more about looking cool than delivering any felt experience. So there is no believable warmth or passion in Eric and Shelly’s relationship. They just come across like two hot stars in a high-end fragrance commercial, and their declarations of love, like every line in the movie, is delivered in stilted seven-word servings. “I need you to love me harder,” Twigs’s spaced-out Shelly tells Eric.

As a sidenote, of course the villain in The Crow has to be a member of the “old guard.” Danny Huston’s Vincent Roeg is a Faustian figure who preys on struggling, slum-dwelling youths while he enjoys a life of wealth and privilege, celebrating the classical arts and swanning around in his country estate. There’s that powerful thematic depth again.

At least Skarsgård does an admirable job in conveying Eric’s obviously long-suppressed dark side. He also delivers the action hero goods in a more interesting way, as Eric isn’t skilled; just motivated, fighting through his pain, even if he can’t be killed. However, again it’s more about appearances, so the audience is treated to innumerable shots of Skarsgård’s abs, and the tattoos that make him look like a desk in detention. We don’t ever see Eric grieve or rage in a convincing way. Watching Shelly sink into the depths of the afterlife, he doesn’t try to swim after her on regaining his breath, rage at his impotence in the situation, or even yell for help. He just wanders around Purgatory morosely until he’s given a rundown of his new powers.

For the record, The Crow (2024) is fully Eric’s story. There is no good cop or skateboarding little girl for him to engage with, or help frame the story for viewers, as there was back in Nineties.

The Crow isn’t terrible, but it is bland all round. On the visual front, the lifelessness is surprising from Sanders who has a history of delivering striking shots. Here, though, he seems more concerned with Zack Snyder-esque slo-mo, and the most interesting part of the whole movie is the theatrical performance paired with Eric’s opera house rampage.

In terms of the narrative, while the 1994 film hit the ground running, this reinterpretation takes forever to get going, forcing its revenge portion to be rushed out. It also feels oddly excessive at times given how lacking in degradation Eric and Shelly’s deaths are. The retaliation doesn’t quite match the crime, especially when the most vicious part of it is directed at hired event security who weren’t even involved in the original act.

Plus, even with Sanders reportedly banning all real guns from the set, it’s still distasteful to see Eric graphically take so many shots to the chest given what happened to Brandon Lee when he played The Crow’s protagonist decades ago.

Maybe a new generation of teenagers will find something meaningful and moving in 2024’s The Crow. However, if the franchise returns to the cemetery for a few more years, it doesn’t feel like a loss at this point. A dull and brain-numbing disappointment.

The Crow is in cinemas from Friday, 23 August.