What do you remember most about the 1994 movie The Crow? Is it the soundtrack, a semiperfect hodgepodge of industrial-music MVPs (My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, Machines of Loving Grace, Nine Inch Nails), next-gen alt-rock (Helmet, Rage Against the Machine, Stone Temple Pilots), and goth royalty (the Cure)? The recasting of Detroit as a dystopian hellscape? Villainous lovers Michael Wincott and Bai Ling vamping around a dimly-lit den and setting new standards for #CreepyCoupleGoals? The adorable skateboarding moppet that informs detective Ernie Hudson that onions on hot dogs cause farting? The fact that the whole thing feels like a homicidal mime accidentally wandered into a Stabbing Westward music video?
Or is it the tragedy that befell the movie’s leading man, and cast a pall over this blockbuster even as it secured the film’s eulogistic legacy? Hitting theaters near the exact midpoint between Tim Burton’s Batman and the first X-Men film, this adaptation of James O’Barr’s comics — about a man who comes back from the dead to avenge his murdered girlfriend — was one of several early toe-dips into darker superhero cinema. But what it was really designed to do was launch the career of Brandon Lee, the son of Bruce Lee, as a new action star. His accidental death on set, eight days before the movie wrapped, initially added a morbid edge to the project. Yet his performance remains the single best thing about the film, and what could have been crass exploitation is transformed into a tribute to the charismatic actor at the center of it all. You thrill to Lee’s undeniable presence and mourn the career that could have been.
Thus The Crow 2024 finds itself in a bit of a bind right from the jump: Publicists were quick to say that director Rupert Sanders’ take was not a remake, “but a reimagining of the original graphic novel.” Noted. Still, it’s safe to assume that, even with numerous iterations of O’Barr’s vengeful, resurrected hero gracing a half-dozen publishers’ books over the past 35 years, more people associate this particular IP with a single screen outing. That’s the nostalgia and brand recognition they want to cash in on, for better or worse. Yet to try and have someone step into a role synonymous with both a specific actor and a grief-infused backstory adds an insanely high degree of difficulty. Remember how much you loved the first movie? Cool! Now forget all about the guy who starred in it and that whole “curse” thing and the plot in general, but, like, not so much that you won’t buy a ticket or give a new Crow a chance!
The good news: They made a smart choice in terms of finding a person who might fill those Demonias boots. Bill Skarsgård can do lithe action hero and skin-crawling nightmare fodder with equal amounts of ease; if you need someone to play a killing machine or a killer clown, he’s your guy. Skarsgård is also exactly the kind of offbeat-sexy that turns working actors into internet boyfriends, and could sell the idea of a doomed romantic who’d literally go to hell and back for the object of his affection. Give the tall, pale, and handsome Swede some smeared mascara, a long black trenchcoat (but skip the shirt), and a razor-cut shag, and you’ve got the ideal Hot Mall-Goth Summer poster boy. It helps that he’s also, you know, really talented and can carry a movie.
Now comes the bad part: There’s not much of a movie to carry. True to the marketing department’s word, The Crow 2.0 is not a remake of the original film. As for going back to the source material … let’s just say that “reimagining” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The bare-bones basics are present and accounted for, in that there is indeed a deep bond between Skarsgård’s Eric Draven and his true love Shelly, played by FKA Twigs; his character does [spoiler] die; a crow leads him back to the land of the living; he dresses like he’s auditioning for a Bauhaus cover band; and shit goes down. The overall caw remains the same.
From there, however, this new Crow flies in a variety of different directions, none of which do much to reinterpret, expand, or improve upon O’Barr’s notion of an avenging angel settling scores. There’s a hint of trauma in Eric’s past, which leads him to a recovery center, where he’s bullied and marginalized. That’s also the scene of his meet-cute with Shelly, who’s using rehab to hide out from the bad folks looking for her. When the couple make a break for it to the sounds of Joy Division’s “Disorder” — the soundtrack subs in Nineties rock for K-Tel’s Greatest ’80s Goth/Synth Hits, as well as opera and [checks notes] Enya — they hide out in a friend’s posh flat, have a lot of stylishly-filmed sex, and later meet up with friends by a lake. For the first half, their lovers-on-the-run story takes precedence over anything remotely mythic or supernatural. Sanders and screenwriters Zach Baylin and William Schneider will get around to the superheroics in due time. But first, they want to give you Crowmeo and Juliet.
You can see why this is a good idea in theory: Why not let audiences get invested in these characters before evil tears them apart, and the violence begins in earnest? Execution-wise, this emphasis on Skarsgård and FKA Twigs whispering sweet nothings in each other’s ears devolves into a cross between a faux-erotic perfume commercial and outtakes from a failed YA series, and couldn’t feel more sluggish. But we know that danger is heading their way, since Danny Huston has made some sort of deal where he sends others’ souls to hell so he doesn’t have to go there, and he has the ability to coo some evil-ASMR that causes people to become either stabby or self-destructive. The how, when, or why of this is left to your imagination, intentionally or otherwise. We also know his minions are after Shelly because of a video she’s in possession of that Huston wants; whether these thugs are also Satan-adjacent, or just well-dressed corporate lackeys, or both, or neither, is anyone’s guess.
Eventually, the bad guys catch up to them, both are murdered, and Eric wakes up in a limbo filled with steel girders and birds. Lots and lots of birds. After a good deal of pinging between the worlds of the living and the deceased-in-waiting, he makes a deal with a mystery man (Sami Bouajila): His soul for Shelly’s. The catch is that Eric has to kill everyone responsible for their deaths. Luckily, he has crows on his side — hooray! — and can feel pain, but can’t be killed.
Upon his return, Eric stalks the grimy, set-designed streets (you remember that Sanders is responsible for both Snow White and the Huntsman and that live-action Ghost in the Shell, and has a weakness for dark-revisionism chic) and gets wounded a bunch. When The Crow finally lets him go full vigilante in an opera house, it makes up for lost time by shoving a whole feature’s worth of horror-movie kills and copious gore into 10 minutes. Cool. Not even mutating into Death Wish in pancake makeup, however, can salvage what feels like a flailing attempt to reintroduce a cult character from a cult comic/movie into today’s all-superhero-all-the-time entertainment landscape. It doesn’t take long to realize that what was meant to be a franchise-starter is, unlike its hero, permanently DOA.
