The Crow (2024) – Review

They say that when a soul travels to the land of the dead, a crow can bring them back to take care of some unfinished business if the need is great enough…
That’s the only explanation I have for the existence of the remake of The Crow that has finally risen from grave after spending around ten years in development hell after chewing up and spitting out numerous directors and actors at a frightening rate. Well, now it’s finally here courtesy of the director/Crow team of Rupert Sanders and Bill Skarsgård, but the common consensus seemed to be that maybe Eric Draven should’ve stayed dead and kept the franchise with him after fans (and even the director) of the original movie came after it with supernatural vengence in their eyes.
And yet… could this movie really be the lowest point in a franchise that practically bottomed out after its first installment and steadily got worse from there – because if any film series was practically begging for a second chance at life, it’s the Crow.

After a youth spent abusing drugs thanks to a traumatic childhood incident involving a wounded horse (no, really), fucked up, tattooed and tragically lost Eric Draven spends his days being bullied in an oddly fascist rehab centre while dressed in a pink tracksuit. However, his empty life soon acquires meaning when the premises are graced by a new patient named Shelly and the two bond pretty much at first sight and after a couple of days they are virtually inseparable.
However, Shelly has something of a dark past and has only ended up in rehab because she needed to avoid the dark forces amassing around her due to some damning footage she has on her phone that concerns the Satanic practices of businessman/crime lord Vincent Roeg who has been claiming innocent souls for his dark master in order to prolong his life and has the ability to puppeteer his victims with a mere whisper. In an effort to keep his new beloved one step ahead of her enemies, Eric does a Charlie Sheen and breaks them out of rehab so they can start a new life together where she takes his sullen poetry and puts it to music.
While we take a moment to allow the dry heaving to pass, their happy existence comes to a screeching halt when Roeg’s goons finally catches up with them and – in proper Crow – dispatches them promptly to the netherworld beyond with a short, sharp case of death. However, on the other side, Eric is approached by a mysterious figure who offers him a bargin – return to life and kill the ones who killed him and both he and Shelly can have another shot at life.
Reborn as an unkillable agent of supernatural vengence, all Eric has to do to stay on course is to ensure that his love for Shelly remains pure and slaughter every goon in his path, but when Roeg hears that a man who can’t die is on his case, he makes plans to try and take that power for himself.

Regardless of your views of Hollywood’s rather alarming lack of new ideas, there are some franchises that manage to sink so low, that you actively wish they would get rebooted just so some glory might once again be heaped upon its name; but most of the time you just hope that – at the very least – we get an entry that ranks as second best. For example, while I have no great love for the Robocop remake, I’ll happily concede it’s not the worst of the bunch by a comfortable margin and if we’re being utterly fair, this new Crow technically slots into the same space.
Simply put, there have been better Crow movies (despite its dated nature, I still highly rate the original Crow as a comic book triumph), and there have been worse Crow movies (take your fucking pick), but the main problem that this 2024 version has is that it seem genuinely unsure as to what a Crow movie actually should be.
While the quality of the sequels got pretty shoddy as the movies limped on, even the wretched Edward Furlong one knew that it was probably a good idea to slap some variation of the face paint on and get down to some killin’, however at almost every turn Sanders chooses to take the long way round, think that if we are going to take Eric and Shelly’s relationship seriously, we have to spend hefty amounts of time with them as cooing such eyeball rolling compliments at each other as describing their lover as “Beautifully broken” or kookily dancing in front of a bonfire while the other one watches. The thing is, the original Crow never had to spell out the central relationship, opting instead to skim over it as a form of shorthand and use the late Brandon Lee’s performance to show us the level of loss that we’re are dealing with. But while that Crow dealt with his loss with incandescent rage and a very 90s soundtrack, Skarsgård’s take on Draven seems to mostly wallow in grief and despair. As a result the visual eye of Sanders that previously gave us Snow White And The Huntsman and Ghost In The Shell gives us an endlessly colourless palette that only partially holds the interest.

Maybe the movie would be easier to love if it fast tracked Draven’s rampage into something more urgent and vital, but even after our mourning hero has died and been resurrected, the movie still refuses to step on the gas, instead having Eric discover why his lover died like a very slow paced noir instead of skipping to the good stuff.
So, is there any good stuff? Well, despite making this Crow frustratingly slow on the uptake, Skarsgård cuts a rather fine figure if you can get past the Jared Leto Joker tattoos and trailer park haircut – and the scene where he strides into an opera house armed with only a samurai sword is the gore soaked action sequence we were screaming for the moment the film started. But the movie’s insistence of continuously taking the long way round just kills any real kind of momentum the film and it even has you picking holes in a lot of the plot points. Not a lot of explanation is given concerning Danny Houston’s devil worshiping baddie and if such a powerful crime lord can be thrown off by something as an incriminating video on a phone, he can’t be that all powerful, surely? Also, if you’re going to go all in on Shelly and Eric’s relationship, maybe don’t have it feel like they’ve only been dating a few weeks after escaping from rehab and then claim that their love was so pure it could break the very boundaries of life and death.

While hardly the unwatchable dumpster fire some would have you believe – it’s technically following up The Crow: Wicked Prayer, remember – The Crow 2024 would probably work best on someone who has never heard of the franchise before who’s partial to a bit of extravagant eye makeup.
Sadly, it’s back to the grave once again for this series.

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