USA/UK/Germany. 2024.
Crew
Director – Rupert Sanders, Screenplay – Zach Baylin & William Schneider, Based on the Graphic Novel The Crow (1989) by James O’Barr, Producers – Samuel Hadida, Victor Hadida, Molly Hassell, John Jencks & Edward R. Pressman, Photography – Steve Annis, Music – Voker Bertelmann, Visual Effects Supervisors – Neil Impey & Sean Mathiesen, Visual Effects – Black Sail Pictures (Supervisor – Manuel Hufschmid), Host VFX (Supervisor – Mike Cosgrave), Magiclab (Supervisor – Michael Krecek), Pixomondo (Supervisor – Moritz Bock), Rise Visual Effects Studios (Supervisor – Sebastian Lauer), Scanline VFX (Supervisor – Falk Büttner) & Trixter (Supervisor – Alessandro Cioffi), Prosthetics/Makeup Effects Designer – David White, Makeup Effects Supervisor – Sacha Carter, Production Design – Robin Brown. Production Company – Pressman Film/Hassell Free/Electric Shadow Co/Davis Films/30West/Ashland Hill Media Finance/Filmfernsehfonds Bayern/German Federal Film Fund (DFFF).
Cast
Bill Skarsgård (Eric), FKA Twigs (Shelly), Danny Huston (Vincent Roeg), Laura Birn (Marion), David Bowles (Wickham), Josette Simon (Sophia), Sami Bouajila (Kronos), Jordan Bolger (Chance), Karel Dobry (Roman), Izabella Wei (Zadie), Dukagjin Podrimaj (Detective Milch)
Plot
Eric and Shelly meet up in drug rebab and quickly connect. However, Shelly becomes afraid when she finds people coming for her and so Eric arranges for the two of them to make an escape. They go into hiding at the apartment of a friend of Shelly’s. However, the people pursuing Shelly break in, killing both her and Eric. Eric comes around in an afterlife netherworld. The guardian Wickham offers Eric the opportunity to bring Shelly back to life. He is returned to life and sets out to hunt down and eliminate the people responsible for their murder. This brings Eric up against the kingpin Vincent Roeg, who has remained immortal by being able to send innocent souls to Hell in his place.
The Crow (1989) was a graphic novel from James O’Barr, published in four issues from Caliber Press. O’Barr wrote the graphic novel to expiate his grief about the loss of his fiancée who was killed by a drunk driver. The graphic novel was an immediate hit. O’Barr has released sporadic other Crow stories over the years under different publishers. The success of the films has seen a host of other Crow related merchandising, including a series of six original novels, a short story anthology, a card game and a videogame.
The graphic novel was adapted into a film with The Crow (1994), a directorial debut for Alex Proyas and starring Brandon Lee as Eric. The film was overshadowed by the real-life tragedy of Brandon’s shooting on set with a prop gun. The film was acclaimed and has since become a cult classic. This was followed by three sequels The Crow: City of Angels (1996), The Crow: Salvation (2000) and The Crow: Wicked Prayer (2005) and a tv series The Crow: Stairway to Heaven (1998-9).
A remake or reboot of The Crow has been debated since about the mid-2000s. Various names were mentioned in the director’s seat including Stephen Norrington, director of Blade (1998) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003); Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, director of Intacto (2001) and 28 Weeks Later (2007); F. Javier Gutierrez, director of Before the Fall (2008) and Rings (2017); and Corin Hardy, director of The Nun (2018). There was been a fascinating line-up of names mentioned in the lead, including Luke Evans, Ryan Gosling, Tom Hiddleston, Nicholas Hoult, James McAvoy, Jason Momoa and Mark Wahlberg, and with Kirsten Stewart as Shelly at one point.
Sometimes you can tell a project is going to be a disaster from the people attached to it. In this case, surely the choice of a director who has yet to have made a film that has not been a box-office flop, critically trashed or been hated by fans of the source material may well have indicated something. In this case, the remake ended up in the hands of Rupert Sanders, a former commercials and music video director from the UK who made Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) and the disastrous English-language remake of Ghost in the Shell (2017). That’s aside from almost everybody associated with the original saying that the remake was a bad idea. Not unexpectedly, the remake ended up flopping, earning only $21 million worldwide against a production budget of $50 million, while being universally critically trashed.
The Crow remake promptly dies on screen in front of you. It is an epic of miscalculation of just about every level. The original James O’Barr graphic novel had a unique black-and-white visual scheme, which Alex Proyas made a point to replicate in the first film. It is something that has duly made the original into a Goth classic. All of that is dismissed by the time of the remake where we get a standard lighting scheme. Some of the shots are tricked out with murders of crows flying in the background of what looks like an artfully abandoned train station but that is the nearest we get to any Gothic mood.
Eric even fails to get his iconic back-and-white makeup until about three-quarters of the way through the film, where the look of the character feels as though it is emasculated to give us Bill Skarsgård in short back and sides with tattoos. Indeed, with Bill Skarsgård wandering around mundanely wielding handguns, samurai swords and driving cars, what we have feels more like a supernaturally empowered John Wick than it does anything of The Crow. Sanders does perk the show up in mid-film with a scene where Bill Skarsgård brutally slaughters his way through dozens of lackeys in the foyer of an opera house but it comes too late and feels as though it has strayed in from the wrong film.
Even the soundtrack feels a bad comedown. The soundtrack of the original went triple platinum and has become a classic of its type. It was filled with tracks from Goth and industrial bands of the day, including The Cure, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine, Henry Rollins, Stone Temple Pilots, The Jesus and Mary Chain and others, while the soundtrack for the sequel The Crow: City of Angels enjoyed similar popularity. Here we get the odd track from Joy Division and Gary Numan and then .. Enya. When it comes to casting FKA Twigs, a musician better known in R&B, the realisation is that the people behind the film have no clue about the property they are trying to deal with, its fandom or Goth popularity, and regard it as nothing more than a set of niches that can be ticked off.
The other aspect is the substantial changes made to the script. The original had Eric tragically affected by the murder of Shelly but their relationship and the murder was over and done even before the original starts – indeed, the 1994 film opens with the police at the scene of their murder. We get occasional flashbacks to their relationship throughout but almost the whole of original’s story stays with the resurrected Eric and his trail of vengeance. By contrast, the remake takes 40 minutes – 36 percent of the film’s 111 minute runtime – before it gets to the point where the first film started. There Rupert Sanders valiantly tries to engage in their relationship but it feels a case where the two performers are not much connecting. FKA Twigs, who has only ever appeared in one other acting role in Honey Boy (2019), seems detached and distant.
(Winner in this site’s Worst Films of 2024 list).
Trailer here