THE CROW: Uneven Remake Flutters
By Harrison J. Bahe
Soulmates Eric Draven and Shelly Webster are brutally murdered when the demons of her dark past catch up with them. Given the chance to save his true love by sacrificing himself, Draven returns to seek bloody revenge against the killers, traversing the worlds of the living and the dead to put the wrong things right.
OR
Two drug addicts escape rehab, immediately take drugs, fall in love in less than a week, and are then murdered by a Satanic powered villain and his henchmen. After knowing her for less than a week, the man decides to become the Crow and kill the people who killed them to save her soul from hell.
You just know a movie is in trouble when the film lists ALL thirty executive producers in the opening credits before the actors and title are shown. My theory is that the film director didn’t want his name shown first and instead wanted to show the world who was responsible for this travesty of a remake. The 2024 Crow remake feels like a movie that had notes from multiple Executive Producers and the filmmakers caved to all of them. As a result, the film is an uneven slog fest that I found myself bored with at times and shocked with others due to the baffling shift in tone and style.
Bill Skarsgaard does his own thing with the character of Eric Draven being so detached from the iconic Brandon Lee iteration. I don’t know about you but I found it very difficult to connect to our two main love birds. They’re drug addicts in a rehab facility who escape together, do more drugs in the outside world, fall in love in a week, and are then murdered by a Satanic powered villain’s henchmen because she had a video on her phone murdering someone while possessed. I’m sure someone out there will relate to these characters but I just couldn’t. Imagine if you will, if people like Post Malone, Machine Gun Kelly and Lil Peep became the Crow. Could you take them seriously?
Aside from unrelatable characters, the Crow also suffers from pacing issues and tonal changes. I feel I’d get a lot more out of this movie if it was 20 minutes shorter. Even my movie going buddy agreed that he found himself bored in many scenes. Eric Draven starts off as a clumsy resurrected hero, often times bumbling into victories but then suddenly goes full on Samurai sword wielding, blood spilling, antihero death machine. Whether the antihero-ness is paying more homage to the source material is beyond me. I’ve never read the comic books. But our hero quickly becomes an antihero with the amount of over-the-top gratuitous violence he unleashes on a group of poor Opera house security guards.
The Crow is a deeply uneven remake that is so detached from the original iconic Brandon Lee iteration that it can still remain safe in your memory. Unrelatable characters and poorly handled supernatural elements make the Crow flutter to the ground. The only saving grace for this movie critic was its gore. There is no doubt that the Crow leans heavily into its R-rating. Unfortunately, it feels like a Frankenstein’s monster of multiple people’s ideas. Oh it should be more romantic. The leads should be drug addicts. In a rehab. The bad guy should whisper demons into other people. This movie isn’t violent enough. We need to make it more violent. It feels like it has too many people controlling the wheel and the film suffers for that. Which is why I give the Crow….
2 Samurai Swords out of 5