(Bloomberg) -- The Crow, a new adaptation of the James O’Barr comic book series, is a genuinely perplexing film. I mean that on a broad level: How did Hollywood struggle for decades to reboot this property and end up with such a lackluster product?
The idea behind The Crow is honestly cool: Eric Draven, avenging his dead lover, exists between death and life hunting down the people who killed her, all while aided by an all-seeing bird. When the original Crow movie, directed by Alex Proyas, was released in 1994, it offered a template for alternative kids for years to come with its soundtrack full of the Cure and Nine Inch Nails and careful use of black eyeliner and lipstick.
That first movie is by no means a masterpiece—it’s got a specifically ’90s grit and corniness—but it looms large in the cultural memory as a totemic piece of goth entertainment and a relic of a Hollywood tragedy. Star Brandon Lee, the son of martial arts legend Bruce Lee, was accidentally killed after being shot by a prop gun on set. The film was released posthumously.
That legacy was always going to hang over whatever future versions of The Crow would emerge, but it didn't stop studios from trying with all their might to revive O’Barr’s saga. There were three Crow sequels, but none of them featured the character of Eric Draven.
A rebooted Crow was in the works as far back as 2008, and at various points actors including Luke Evans and Jason Momoa were going to play the undead vigilante character of Eric.
But before the screening of the new film, ultimately directed by Rupert Sanders, a publicist sent a note to critics emphasizing that this Crow is not a remake of the 1994 movie The Crow, based on the same property. Instead, “it’s a reimagining of the original graphic novel.”
Eventually, the role went to Bill Skarsgård, who plays it with none of the manic glee that Lee memorably brought to the role. Instead, Skarsgård slinks around with massive shoulders and little personality. The member of the now-legendary Swedish acting clan excelled at playing the ultimate creepy clown in the It films, but here he’s watered down and humorless.
The Crow is an entirely sullen affair. The film opens with a flashback to Eric’s childhood, where he watches a beloved horse die after being caught on a wire fence. The next time we see him he’s wearing a pink sweatsuit in rehab.
There he meets the wide-eyed, flirtatious and similarly morose Shelly (FKA twigs). She’s on the run from some mysterious enforcers who want an incriminating video in her possession. (The footage inside is treated as a big reveal later.) Shelly’s pursuers are under the command of Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), a classical music aficionado whose superpower is being able to whisper words in unsuspecting victims’ ears that turn them into white-eyed zombies to do his bidding.
Nearly half of the movie is dedicated to the unfolding of Eric and Shelly’s romance, scored to Joy Division. Sure, music choices are generally spot-on throughout the film, but the emotion on screen fails to match that of the soundtrack. Spending all this time on the love story wouldn’t be a problem if the two characters weren’t so thinly drawn. FKA twigs, best known as a musician, can be charmingly wistful with her high voice, but Shelly’s motivations are so cloudy all she can play is the idea of a goth dream girl.
All we know of Eric, meanwhile, is that he had a vaguely grim upbringing represented in brief fragments that make you suspect entire scenes of backstory got cut. Skarsgård likewise leaves the character as a blank slate. There’s no reason at all to care for Eric because his sole defining quality is that he “looks cool”—assuming your idea of cool is face tattoos and a mullet.
More than an hour into the runtime, Shelly and Eric are murdered by Roeg’s minions. But instead of dying, as Shelly does, Eric is sent to a netherworld filled with crows where he learns that he can potentially bring his love back to life if he kills those who harmed her. Back in the real world, he finds he is impervious to bullets and other forms of mortal harm, so we are treated to some gruesome images of his body repairing itself as he pops his bones into place.
It all culminates in a long sequence set at an opera house where Eric alleviates henchmen of their limbs. The excessive bloodshed gets creative sometimes, such as when a baddie’s jaw gets slashed off his face, but it also feels perfunctory, derivative of more inventive action filmmaking like the John Wick series.
Given that The Crow spends so much time attempting to develop Shelly and Eric’s deep connection, all this violence should have some weight behind it. We should care about these two sad lovers now trapped in different worlds. Yet, it’s all meaningless thanks to a script so full of holes it could be these characters’ stab wound- and bullet-riddled bodies. Meanwhile, Sanders does nothing visually to augment the lackluster material. Every muddy frame has the appeal of a Hot Topic store.
The ’90s mall chain that commodified alternative culture is a good metaphor for this incarnation of The Crow, as it turns out. For all the possibilities that the original material provides, this version is just a poseur trying to convince you it’s radically dark, and yet another example of Hollywood mining recognizable IP to make a buck.
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