Can you believe they finally really did it? They remade THE CROW! We don’t need to go into the whole litany of attempts, but they’ve been announcing versions of this for 16 years. And now they did it. And they released it.
The people I hear from online are, to put it mildly, not eager to welcome this new little birdy into the world. Many people hold the original 1994 movie, and sometimes the James O’Barr comic book it was based on, sacred. It’s a cool movie, people a little younger than me saw it as angsty teens, they feel connected to the soundtrack, and of course it’s a movie about tragedy that you can’t separate from the actual tragedy of Brandon Lee. There are people who instinctively pull out the torches and pitchforks for any remake announcement no matter what, but this one feels more religious, like when THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST came out.
It’s possible that’s an internet exclusive. When a real life friend brought up the remake a while back and I mentioned people being up in arms about it she was completely baffled. But now the reviews are out and critics too are acting like a pile of rotting garbage crawled out of a dumpster, rang their doorbell and asked if it could wear their favorite shirt. (It’s at 29 on Metacritic.) A movie as rejected and disreputable as its hero.
I’m posting from an undisclosed location, I know all the exits, I got my go-bag packed, so I’m gonna give it to you straight: I liked THE CROW (2024). Not just “it’s not as bad as they’re saying” – I honestly think it’s pretty good.
I’ll get the negative things out of the way first, but for me that’s a short list. There are one and a half important things that I like better in the original. The first is the ultra-goth, expressionistic gloom of it – the endless night, the stylized model city, it has a real larger-than-life sense of place that I love, that makes the movie endure. The new version is pretty stylish, it looks good, but not like that.
The other reason is the villains – in the original they were so colorfully sleazy, such nightmarish degenerates, these are a more standard type. I consider this a negative because Danny Huston (30 DAYS OF NIGHT) as Vincent Roeg is not as cool of a villain as Michael Wincott as Top Dollar. But I’m not counting it as a full negative because I like the meaning of his villainy better. We’ll come back to that.
Maybe the reason I’m an outlier here, besides great taste and a cosmically transcendental understanding of da movies, is a long history of revisiting variations on this story and trying to understand why it doesn’t fully work for me anymore. I reviewed the 1994 film once in 2009 and again last May. I reviewed THE CROW: CITY OF ANGELS in my Summer Flings series, I reviewed THE CROW: SALVATION for The Ain’t It Cool News when it came out and again last April, when I also reviewed THE CROW: WICKED PRAYER. Obviously THE CROW 1994 is way better than any of those sequels, but as much as I love its style I do have some issues with its substance, especially as I get older. People who hold it more sacred than I do will hate this new version, because it’s a very different film, but I really appreciate it standing on its own while addressing pretty much everything that bothers me about the original.
This is partly the story of Shelly, played by the singer FKA Twigs. Her friend Zadie (Isabella Wei) sends her a video she thinks they can use to expose the wrongdoings of a powerful man. Shelly knows the existence of the video puts her in danger so she tries to leave town, but gets busted for drug possession and sent to a (rehab? psychiatric?) facility.
That’s where she meets Eric (Bill Skarsgård, ATOMIC BLONDE), who’s covered in ink and muscle, and so traumatized by his shitty childhood that the other patients can’t get him to talk even when they pin him against the wall and threaten to beat him. He talks to Shelly, though, and when the people she’s hiding from arrive to “visit,” the two of them escape and hide out together in an extended fling of unspecified duration. They’re fellow dirtbag psychedelic enthusiasts and artists (she sings, he draws spooky pictures and writes words he doesn’t consider either poems or songs), but we see she runs in rich-people circles from the friend’s apartment she has access to. At first I assumed it was a drug thing, she partied with this guy Roeg, but really she was one of his piano prodigies. Her mother (Josette Simon, Blake’s 7) seems to be upper class and working with them to find her.
Top Dollar was a gangster/slumlord, but also some kind of warlock, with a witch girlfriend. This guy Roeg’s supernatural angle is a vampiric/Faustian thing. He finds innocent people to suck energy from, and he’s lived hundreds of years by giving their souls to Hell. But he passes for respectable – a normal, suit wearing rich guy and patron of the arts, choosing young woman pianists and sponsoring their careers. I think metaphorically he’s like that doctor on the gymnastics team or Jeffrey Epstein or Harvey Weinstein or other powerful predators who get away with abusing young women for years and years because the people who find out about it feel like they have to protect the organization, or their own financial situation, or their career, and the more they do that the more their complicity snowballs and becomes harder to extricate themselves from. That’s what Roeg’s right hand woman Marion (Laura Birn, A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES) says when her number comes up. It started out small, then before long it was too much to get out from under.
So although Top Dollar was cooler, I think Roeg is truer. The original THE CROW is a vast improvement over the comic book’s one-dimensional, subhuman criminals, but it’s still based in DEATH WISH style urban paranoia. Almost everybody in Detroit is dirty, scummy, perverted, out to get you, deserving of death. People in the streets and clubs are sickos, except for our special rock ’n roll boy, who accosts them with Edgar Allan Poe quotes. 2024 CROW sees the world differently – the dirtbags are the good guys, the grimy, graffitied spots and tattoo parlors are places of refuge, the people you gotta be scared of have money, wear suits and live in the clean part of town. The final battle takes place at an opera house.
Because of that, much of the violence is set to classical music, and surprisingly most of the rest of the soundtrack doesn’t seem aimed at the younger and hipper than us. It’s mostly Joy Division, Gary Numan, The Cure stuff like that. Also, it taught me that “Ready Or Not” by the Fugees comes from an eerie Enya song called “Boadicea,” which forced me to ask “Is Enya good?” Anyway, if you’re hoping to yell at this movie to get off your lawn, it will have to be on the basis of tattoos or haircuts, not that noise they listen to these days and call music.
It’s probly for the best we never saw ’94 Eric’s band play. There’s a strong chance it would lower my opinion of him. But this one has a part where they record a little song together, and it’s a good scene. Shelly can sing! (I don’t know FKA Twigs’ music.)
It has always bothered me that in the original – and this comes straight from the comic, if I remember right – Shelly is not even a character. She only exists as your standard dead wife memories – flashes of smiles and sex. Enough to say “they’re in love, you get it” and justify why he enjoys tormenting and murdering her killers. There’s a term in comic books called “fridging,” to describe the trope of something horrible happening to a female character to create drama for the male hero. The name comes from a time when Green Lantern came home to discover a super villain had killed his girlfriend and stuffed her in the refrigerator. But at least that poor lady had a whole other issue where she was a living person doing alive stuff! The 1994 CROW opens with Shelly already figuratively in the fridge.
This time she’s a main character, a genuine presence, the co-lead of at least a third of the movie, seems more like half. We see them falling in love, we see what they bring to each others’ lives, and I found myself invested in it. I don’t know Twigs as a singer, I knew the name but didn’t even know what she looked like, but I like her natural presence here, I get why he’s crazy about her. To me it’s a deeper story, more fleshed out characters, fucked up and fucked over and trying to grasp some type of happiness while they can, eventually by mythical supernatural violence. It’s just more interesting than “you killed my girlfriend, I must kill you (after I play a guitar solo on the roof).”
The mythology is elaborated on a little, but it was so simple before that it’s still not too complicated. After dying Eric follows a guy who the credits call Kronos (Sami Bouajila, THE BOUNCER) into a flooded, grown-over warehouse full of fog and crows that apparently exists between the living and the dead. Kronos tries to explain things to him and pushes him into puddles that send him back to the living world.
Eric wonders, like I did last time I watched the ’94 version, why he’s the one to come back and not Shelly. This time there’s a reason: Roeg gave her innocent soul to Hell to extend his life. Kronos tells Eric if he kills these people it will restore balance and bring her back. So his goal is not revenge, he’s not going DEATH WISH II on some guys. And he’s not an indestructible force getting off on killing until he loses his powers, it’s an uphill battle the whole time. He’s confused about what’s happening to him, it seems like a dream. He feels pain and gets horribly fucked up. Killing these guys is a struggle at first. The first time he fires a gun it’s inside a car, he loses his hearing for a minute and seems to be in shock. And (SPOILER) he actually fails his task, not by not murdering good enough, but because his unconditional love for Shelly falters when he learns something bad about her. So it’s him proposing a new deal with Kronos that leads to fully becoming “The Crow,” and I think that’s a smart touch to give him more agency in it. Only then does he get good at being a killing machine and start having fun with it, so it feels less sadistic, less like a gross power fantasy.
And yet it’s gorier than the ’94 version! When you hate this movie can you at least have the courtesy to acknowledge “Hey guys, good job on the violence”? There’s lots of thick, gooey blood, lots of limbs chopped off, he goes pretty overboard. Yes, he heals from bullet and knife wounds, but it’s worse than that. Bones and intestines poking out of his wounds, hit by a car, good stuff. He gets a sword stabbed through him and (spoiler) figures what the hell, he leans down and uses it to poke out a guy’s eyeball. Way to “yes and,” The Crow. He goes to an old friend (Jordan Bolger, THE WOMAN KING) to get a gun, and when they’re hanging out we notice that this guy has a bunch of posters for old samurai movies and even CRYING FREEMAN starring Mark Dacascos (!) on his walls, so later Eric has a samurai sword, and it makes perfect sense that guy would’ve had one. (And I’m thankful that he uses the sword more than the gun.)
The screenplay is credited to Zach Baylin (KING RICHARD, CREED III) and William Josef Schneider (RETURN TO SILENT HILL). The director is Rupert Sanders. Any Rupert Sanders fans out there? I’m gonna guess no. I thought his first film SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN was pretty dull, but I was surprised to find it looked amazing. His second was GHOST IN THE SHELL, which I had issues with, but I thought they were interesting issues to dissect (check out that review) and I don’t think anyone would deny how cool it looks. Although THE CROW is his first movie I’ve liked unreservedly I imagine that puts me in an elite group of fans. So yes, move my name to the “I’ll check out whatever he does next” column.
Even moreso for Skarsgård. (Not even including Robert Eggers’ NOSFERATU, my most anticipated film at this point.) Man – what is up with these Skarsgårds? The dad, Stellan, is one of the greats of course. Older brother Alexander really impressed me with his physical, even bestial performances in THE LEGEND OF TARZAN and THE NORTHMAN, plus he starred in the outstanding INFINITY POOL. But Bill stays entirely out of his shadow with these transformative performances – Pennywise in IT of course, then he went from a prissy High Table dork in JOHN WICK CHAPTER 4 to an absolutely ripped, non-verbal fight machine in BOY KILLS WORLD, and he carries that into this, but with a heartbroken street kid twist.
Of course people will say Brandon Lee was better, but importantly Brandon Lee was different. This is not the Eric who fronts Hangman’s joke, this is the one who plays a little fuzzed out keyboards to encourage Shelly to sing, but admits she can play it better than him. It’s not the Eric who wears leather pants but is nice to kids, it’s the one who maybe burned down his mom’s trailer as a kid and still hasn’t fully adjusted but Shelly thinks he’s “quite brilliantly broken.” Skarsgård makes me sympathetic to that guy and also makes him look cool when he’s a specter on a rampage and let me tell you, none of the guys in the sequels ever pulled off either of those things.
No surprise that this is the best THE CROW since THE CROW. But I think it deserves more credit than that. Some day it might even be acceptable to like it. Buildings burn, people die, but a movie where (SPOILER) the hero comes out covered in blood during the curtain call of an opera and tosses two severed heads into the crowd is forever.
August 26th, 2024 at 7:22 am
I’m sure I’ll watch this when it hits one of my friend’s Plex servers but I seem to be in the progressively smaller and smaller few who saw the ’94 movie in theaters and remember it being…not great? Reviews at the time seem to confirm my feelings. I think because people have strong feelings about the soundtrack (which goddamn rules) and the tragedy around Brandon Lee, those might be bleeding into the OG movie in some sort of 90’s nostalgia stew? I mean, there’s been several Crow sequels and a tv series which no one I know has seen or cares about so I don’t know why this particular movie is getting such hate?
Then again, I didn’t know there were ardent Ghostbusters or Top Gun fans either??!!