It was horribly ironic that The Crow franchise should have fallen under the ownership of Dimension – Miramax’s more genre focused arm – as it, much like the eponymous bird who insists on fiddling with the souls of the violently departed, has a real problem with letting things die.
Its business practice of snapping up recognizable franchises and draining them all for all they’re worth had had some mixed success over the years (just ask Pinhead, Michael Myers and the Children Of The Corn) and thanks to Bob Weinstein’s notoriously fickle ways of doing business, the rot had already begun to set in as soon as the The Crow’s disastrous first sequel: City Of Angel’s. Squalid, muddled and rendered virtually incomprehensible by repeated studio meddling and released too soon to Brandon Lee’s tragic death for comfort, the sequel didn’t even begin to do justice to Alex Proyas’ brutally poetic adaptation of James O’Barr’s mesmerising graphic novel.
However, never one to sit on an established brand name when there’s money to be made – Dimension promptly broke out the shovels and exhumed The Crow for another go.
Three years after being mistakenly fingered for the brutal stabbing of his girlfriend, Lauren, Alex Corvis finally makes his appointment with the electric chair despite constantly claiming he was framed by a man with distinctive scar on his forearm. However, after his body absorbs enough electricity to light up a shopping mall and the death mask burns some familiar looking designs into his face, Corvis rises from the dead to hunt down the scarred-armed man who framed him for murder and avenge his beloved.
As Alex goes about his gothic-tinged business, Lauren’s still-grieving sister, Erin, starts to suspect that her bigwig father knows more than he’s letting on and it’s eventually revealed that Alex isn’t on the trail of just one wrongdoers, but instead is after an entire cabal of crooked cops who all had something to do with the hefty hand of injustice that was delivered to him. While Corvis starts whittling down his kill-list in true, Crow, fashion by waxing lyrical with cynical poetry before delivering a darkly ironic death blow, he gets ever more frustrated that none of the guys he’s killing has the scarred forearm he’s so desperately searching for, but unbeknownst to him, the shadowy mastermind behind the whole shebang knows the particulars of those souls brought back by crows to whup some righteous ass and is preparing to respond accordingly.
Teaming up with Erin to get to the bottom of all this skullduggery, will the fact that Alex has the impressive powers of undying even be enough to overcome this mysterious mastermind who seemingly holds all the cards?
Even when fully accepting the fact that City Of Angels was royally fucked up by an interfering studio, that didn’t stop me from utterly hating the movie when it came out and the only way that the property could get any worse would be if someone in that iconic, harlequin face paint rolled in a vat of dog shit for 90 minutes. Thankfully The Crow: Salvation didn’t include any animal faeces that I could see (not in the film, anway), but it’s still long way away from being the saving grace its title implies thanks to the usual issues of costs being cut where it matters.
However, while this attempt at jolting the series back to life after one duff sequel and Mark Dacascos’ short lived TV series, The Crow: Stairway To Heaven, still leaves a lot to be desired, you can actually tell that the filmmakers are actually trying something slightly different.
While the original movie was a gothic romance fused with a vigilante superhero flick and the second was the same but worse, Salvation shifts the goal posts a little bit and instead melds the usual Crow tropes with something akin to a film noir mystery as Alex attempts to solve his girlfriend’s murder much like you’d probably get if The Cure had flown into Bruce Wayne’s drawing room instead of a bat. Adding a bit of suspense with the wrinkle that Corvis doesn’t actually know who is responsible for hos woes perks up the narative nicely, especially when he’s stalking his perverted prey (one of the cops, for example, is a serial rapist) before laying some much earned smackdown. The movie also, interestingly, tweaks the look of its hero from looking like a die-hard groupie of Sisters Of Mercy to something that matches his premature demise. Hence Corvis struts around fetid apartments and steamy alleyways dressed in his prison overalls with the familar harlequin design seared into his face from the leather hood during his execution and although he picks up a furry collared coat later on that looks like its come from a particularly depressed pimp, it’s a refreshing change.
The cast is suprisingly starry too. Eric Mabius gives the starring role the old college try despite weirdly looking like Fred Gwynne from certain angles, but he’s joined by Kirsten Dunst who looks decidedly out of place in this direct to video pulp and soon moved up to bigger and better comic book adaptations a mere two years later with Spider-Man. Elsewhere within the cast we find genre stalwarts William Atherton (renowned for his unparalleled scumbag work in both Die Hard and Ghostbusters), Remo Williams himself Fred Ward and a pre-Shield Walton Goggins who all knuckle down to the thankless task at hand – but the production arguably suffers from either such a recognizable cast or a packed soundtrack that features songs by Rob Zombie, Filter, Kid Rock (for some reason), Hole and many more.
Yes, while souls brought back to life by the crow can weather bullets, blades and blunt force trauma, it turns out that his Achilles’ heel is still dodgy production values. Director Bharat Nalluri (who went on to make Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day) certainly has a visual flair, but he’s constantly undermined by monetary restrictions which render the action sluggish, the CGI the quality of a mid-nineties screensaver and on top of that, the power of the crow seemingly also has the ability to heal clothing as well as flesh thanks to some sizable continuity errors.
Nowhere near as overwhelmingly wretched as its predecessor, the welcome changes to the status quo still can’t stop this third outing coming across as cheap and more than deserving for its direct to DVD fate.
The movies may be packed with feathered benefactors and second chances for justice, but this latest flight of The Crow just doesn’t have a wing or a prayer…
🌟🌟
We Have Issues 
One comment