This year has been a pretty good one film-wise, so much so that I feel like I may have been lulled into a false sense of security. This may have contributed to my initial dismay with Rupert Sanders’ remake of The Crow with Bill Skarsgård as the titular character. As the credits rolled, I simply tried to process this head-scratching mess of a film that they’re making people pay to watch on the big screen.
The Crow begins in a similar fashion. Bill Skarsgård plays Eric, a dark, brooding, drug-addict, who forms a bond with Shelly (FKA Twigs), in no small part due to their love of tattoos and drugs, in what is supposed to be an all-consuming gothic emo romance. The both of them are then brutally murdered. Eric makes a deal to save Shelly’s soul and to get his revenge on those who killed them. Which then leads us down a path of bloody, bone-breaking violence.
The Crow is a terribly directed, poorly written, wannabe romance that leaves nothing to the imagination. Repeat Sanders, whose staggered filmography doesn’t seem to have a single shining moment – Snow White and the Huntsman, Ghost in the Shell, and now The Crow – seems to have completely given up. Everything here is underdeveloped to the point that nothing on screen is of any emotional consequence. FKA Twigs’ performance is so hollow that is fails to convince us why her death would fuel Eric’s blood-soaked revenge arc.
The pacing is inconsistent. So much so that it made a 111 minute movie feel interminably long. While some action sequences felt relatively charged in the moment, the slow-burn of others were flat, predictable, and utterly unconvincing.
Among the film’s slew of misfires was its desperate need to differentiate itself from the 1994 original. This meant a departure from a more grounded narrative and towards one that was more rooted in fantasy. The result is a movie that feels utterly cartoonish to the point of being inconsequential.
The Crow could’ve been a gritty, grounded, crime-thriller, full of noir references, and maybe even a loving homage to the Brandon Lee original. Instead, what we got is a bland and exaggeratedly violent tale of revenge with stakes so empty that it fails to make us care.
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