111 min | R | August 23, 2024 | Lionsgate
The Crow gets rebooted again. Bill Skarsgard replaces Brandon Lee. The gothic romance is gone. The visual style is gone. What remains is a generic revenge film wearing the wrong costume.
Eric Draven and Shelly Webster are soulmates who meet in rehab. They are murdered by operatives working for a demonic figure. Eric is resurrected by a supernatural force and given the power to avenge their deaths. He paints his face. He kills people. The 1994 Crow is a cult classic because of Brandon Lee’s magnetic performance and Alex Proyas’s gothic visual style. This reboot replaces both with a brooding modern aesthetic that strips everything distinctive from the property. What made The Crow special was its specificity. This version is aggressively generic.
Bill Skarsgard plays Eric with physical commitment and emotional blankness. He is a talented actor who played Pennywise with terrifying specificity. Here he is given nothing specific to do. The character’s grief is told rather than shown. The romance with Shelly is established through montage rather than character. FKA twigs plays Shelly with ethereal beauty and minimal screen time. She is a presence rather than a character. Danny Huston plays the villain with the generic menace of a man who has played this role before. The supporting cast is functional and forgettable.
Rupert Sanders directed Ghost in the Shell and Snow White and the Huntsman. He makes visually polished films that lack soul. This pattern continues. The action sequences are competently choreographed. The violence is graphic. The visual palette is dark and desaturated in ways that flatten rather than enhance the imagery. The original film used darkness as an aesthetic choice. This film uses it as a default setting. The supernatural elements are poorly defined. The rules of Eric’s resurrection are unclear. The climax is noisy and confusing.
The Crow has been in development hell for over a decade. Multiple directors and actors cycled through the project. The film that finally emerged feels like it was made by committee. The gothic romance that defined the original is replaced by a generic action framework. The punk aesthetic is replaced by luxury nihilism. The result is a film that justifies every year it spent in development hell. Some properties should be left alone. This is one of them.