The reboot of 1994’s cult classic The Crow, starring Bill Skarsgård and FKA Twigs, has finally arrived in theatres.
This review contains spoilers for The Crow.
Over the past sixteen years, Lionsgate has planned to reboot the classic 1994 film, The Crow, with plenty of actors attached to star in the project including Bradley Cooper, Luke Evans, and Jason Momoa. The film was stuck in development hell for years going through many directors and actors, seeming like this reimagining would never be made, Lionsgate made a last-ditch effort when Bill Skarsgård and FKA Twigs were cast as the iconic lead roles of Eric & Shelly in April 2022, with Snow White & The Huntsman & the live-action Ghost in The Shell director Rupert Sanders helming the project.
If you’ve seen the trailer, then you know this film is vastly different than the 1994 classic, with many changes like Eric Draven & Shelly Webster being referred to as Eric & Shelly, an ugly mullet from one of the comic runs, and tattoos that make it look like Eric is a huge fan of 2016’s Suicide Squad. While the film has aspects from the comics, all that means nothing when the story feels like an afterthought.
The film begins with Skarsgård narrating a flashback of his childhood horse dying as he is in bed at rehab, even though we never figure out how or why he ended up there. As his horse that is caught in barbed wire is bleeding out, Eric says that there is no greater pain than something you love dying, leaving you alone forever. As I paraphrased that, the line comes across so much worse as Skarsgård’s performance of Eric comes across as if he were a middle schooler who just got dumped by his girlfriend of three days.
Then, the opening credits begin (which is one of my favorite parts of the movie) as we see Eric in a pool of blood moving around in slow motion while Volker Bertelmann’s kickass theme boomed throughout the IMAX auditorium. We are introduced to Shelly (FKA Twigs) who gets a call from a friend that she obtained a video that would take down the villain, Vincent Rogue (Danny Huston) her friend then gets made by some thugs and is forced to kill herself as we are introduced to Rogue’s power of persuasion, that sends innocent souls to hell in return for immortality. While this is an incredibly interesting concept, we rarely see it in the film as Huston is in only a handful of scenes.
Shelly then gets found by an employee of Vincent as she bumps into a Police officer who discovers her illegal pills and promptly arrests her. Shelly is then put into the same rehabilitation center as Eric, which I might add has very confusing rules. The film says it is a rehab complex, yet Eric is bullied constantly by guards and other patients with his room getting ransacked in some unintentionally hilarious moments. As soon as Eric and Shelly meet, the movie becomes unbearably cringeworthy for the next 30 minutes. For some reason, Eric & Shelly are drawn to each other and easily escape the complex when Marion, (Laura Birn) an associate of Vincent’s, tracks her down.
They hide out in one of Shelly’s friends’ penthouse as they do plenty of drugs, drink, and have PG-13 sex. The film expects you to care deeply for these two characters’ relationship when it is built on nothing but substance abuse and sex. In the original film, Eric & Shelly’s relationship worked so well in flashbacks because it gave you glimpses of a deep connection that was wrongfully ended, in this adaptation, I couldn’t have cared less about these two as Skarsgård gives an uncharacteristically bad performance and FKA Twigs sleepwalking through her lines.
They have no chemistry together, which should have been the main focus when developing this movie as it is the driving force for everything that occurs in the film. They get found by more thugs and are suffocated to death. Eric awakes in a poorly-looking railroad station that is supposed to be purgatory. He is greeted by a man named Kronos (Sami Bouajila) who informs him that when there is a sadness that is so great that happens to innocents, a crow will give them another chance to make things right.
In the original film, Eric got revenge on those who killed Shelly and him to let their souls rest together in the afterlife, in this adaptation, Eric is such a bad fighter that he has to sacrifice his soul to hell so Shelly can come back to life. This is such a moronic change to the story because no matter what, they won’t be together again, the audience has no reason to care about either one of these characters, and bringing characters back to life is one of the laziest ways to take a story as their death loses impact. Screenwriters Will Schneider and Zach Baylin have crafted such a poor screenplay with no stakes, horrendous dialogue like, “You’re beautifully broken,” and poor pacing. Eric doesn’t fully become “the Crow” until around 80 minutes into this 111-minute-long film.
He is resurrected a couple of times prior as his love has to remain pure to exact his revenge and save Shelly’s soul from eternal damnation, as soon as Eric discovers what was on the video from earlier in the film, he begins to doubt his love. The video contains Shelly playing the piano at a gathering when Vincent uses his persuasion on Shelly and gets her to murder an innocent woman. Eric then tells Kronos, “My soul for hers,” and finally is gifted the immortal black blood to become the titular character audiences have now spent almost an hour and a half waiting for. What follows is pretty predictable, Eric kills everyone responsible for their deaths one by one with plenty of CGI blood and body parts flying at the camera during the best sequence of the film, a siege on an Operahouse. It’s a shame that this sequence is so enjoyable because it feels like too little too late as we are nearing the conclusion.
Eric finds Vincent hiding at his mansion as the two engage in an anti-climatic showdown which ends in Eric sending Vincent to Hell. Shelly’s soul is resurrected as she shares a brief moment with Eric, before awaking on the floor of the penthouse, revived by paramedics, as Eric’s dead body rests beside her. This makes no sense in the story when we have seen all of these events occur after Shelly’s mom buried her, so the story becomes paradoxical as the film closes with Eric narrating, “Our love will live on through everything she does,” as the film ends.
Overall, The Crow is a disingenuous, passionless, mistake of a movie. Not a single person who worked on this film seemed to care for the source material, with horrendous dialogue, performances, and pacing. This film gives its story and characters no time to breathe, and the result is a movie that feels like it was made for Soundcloud-rapping middle schoolers who are depressed for attention.
The Crow was directed by Rupert Sanders and written by Will Schneider & Zach Baylin. The film stars Bill Skarsgård, FKA Twigs, Laura Birn, and Danny Huston. Lionsgate released the film on August 23, 2024.
