By what can only be summed up as a strange twist of fate, this writer had never gotten around to seeing The Crow, a 1994 adaptation of the indie comic book that predated the comic book-to-film era started by Blade in 1998.

The film, known for the tragic death of lead actor Brandon Lee, had striking visuals that reviewers and budding filmmakers today go crazy for: a moodily lit, grim ambience, unwelcome urban streets and cityscapes, and a plot that unfurls at its own pace in a very lived-in world — the very elements that made Matt Reeves’ The Batman all the rage in the critics and filmmakers’ world.

Low on plot and heavy on style, the old Crow was set in crime-infested Detroit on Devil’s Night — a night before Halloween — where cases of arson on apartment builds are seen visibly from the top-shots of the city’s cramped living areas.

The premise is delivered in the first shots with a voice over: “People once believed that when someone dies, a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead. But sometimes, something so bad happens that a terrible sadness is carried with it, and the soul can’t rest. Then sometimes, the crow can bring that soul back to put the wrong things right.” The unfortunate couple, in this tale of death, resurrection and vengeance, are Eric and Shelly.

The Crow is a quasi-reboot that is a waste of time and money

Four standalone sequels and a TV series later (every entry has new characters), Eric and Shelly return to the screens in unrecognisable form with actors Bill Skarsgård and FKA Twigs (the latter needs to take acting classes) in a quasi-reboot that is a waste of time and money.

Emotionally scarred, short of a set of full eyebrows and covered in tattoos, the reboots’ Eric and Shelly meet at an institute for the mentally troubled. The two flee, live a life of free love and all-night clubbing until Shelly’s past — which deals with a rich man (Danny Huston) who made a pact with the devil for immortality — catches up to them with bloody consequences.

Eric, waking up in a netherworld railway station, makes a deal with an entity to return to Earth for vengeance. The sequence was unnecessary, like the rest of the film.

Although heavily adapted from the comic book by creator James O’Barr, the first Crow kept out scenes of supernatural dealings, forcing the resurrected Eric to learn on the fly who he is and why he has been resurrected. While not done with perfection, learning on-the-go kept one engaged with the slow reveals of the story; the railway station scene, on the other hand, feels like a hackneyed cop-out that spoon-feeds information. It is but one of the big miscalculations.

The dark setting of the 1994 film’s world — an early stylistic choice of Alex Proyas (who did a similarly dark science-fiction film Dark City) — had fit well with the story at hand. In the new film, the story is set in brightly lit, modern skyscrapers (the production is set in the Czech Republic for cost-cutting measures).

The choice of the updated production design fits as much as the direction by Rupert Sanders (Snow White and the Huntsman, Ghost in the Shell). The screenplay by Zach Baylin and William Schneider, on the other hand, deserves a place at the top of the pile of rejected scripts at a studio executives’ table.

Skarsgård — who one may remember from his stint as the evil alien clown Pennywise from Stephen King’s IT — is a really good actor whose efforts to pull off a worthwhile performance are buried under a ton of bad creative decisions. Is it any wonder that the film is available to rent and purchase via Amazon, Apple and other vendors, a mere 20 days after its theatrical release?

Released by Lionsgate, The Crow is rated suitable for adults with an R rating. The film has scenes of excessive sex and violence, bundled within a severely empty experience

Published in Dawn, ICON, September 22nd, 2024