'The Crow' Can't Resurrect A Dead Franchise
Some movies don't need to be rebooted. The updated version of The Crow is a lot like the remake of Robocop. It's a movie that stretches out its character development in an effort to make a deeper narrative but falls flat. I give writers Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider credit. They attempt to make a narrative that's more than about a guy taking revenge. It's a film that makes us see who this guy was before becoming The Crow. We also see why he falls in love with the woman he's avenging. Similar to 2024's The Crow, Robocop (2014) didn't just write off Alex Murphy's wife when they did in the original. She sticks around after his execution until the end of the tale. I understand why they did it. But it takes away from what made the original work. Simplicity.
Paul Verhoeven's Robocop worked because it was an international perspective on American culture, from commercials like Nukem, a parody of Battleship that criticizes America's military power and obsession with domination, to the 6000 SUX car commercial highlighting America's need to always consume more products than we can afford. Robocop is about an ordinary man who's abused by the corporate system. OCP (Omni Consumer Products) only cares about profit. If that means bringing a man back from the dead like he's Jesus Christ in order to create the perfect obedient superweapon, then they'll do what they must to whoever they please. It's a man vs the system story where the bad guys get it in the end. What it wasn't about was Alex Murphy's (Peter Weller) relationship with his wife. A very small part of it was, but the movie kept things simple once he was presumed dead. Something the original Crow did so well.
The Crow (1994) is a story that gets you right into the action. It's about how Eric Draven (Brandon Lee) and Shelly Webster (Sofia Shinas) get brutally murdered and how Eric comes back from the grave to avenge her death. The movie has a forty-two-hour period feel to it, where everything is boiled down to a concise narrative. Eric's girlfriend is killed, and Eric takes revenge. Pretty basic. What the movie wasn't about is why Eric fell in love with Shelly and the kind of person he was before knowing her. We get what kind of person he is through the 1994 film by helping a little girl's mom get off morphine so she can be a mother to her daughter. Through that single scene, we get the kind of guy Eric is. Eric Draven might be a societal reject who loves to rock, but he's also an empathetic man who wants to help other people. Eric Draven in this film is nothing like that.
Eric (Bill Skarsgård) in this movie is a screw-up who seems to only care about himself before meeting Shelly (FKA twigs). Even then, the only other person he cares about is his girlfriend. The way the two meet makes no logical sense. Both are busted for drug possession, leading them to a prison facility that doubles as a rehab center. In the prison, both male and female inmates mingle. How is that possible? Wouldn't all the inmates be mating like Jack Rabbits? When meeting Shelly, the two fall in love. In what may be the easiest prison break I've seen in my entire life. The couple exited through a window in a prison cell and climbed the fence to freedom. I'm not even making up how easy it was.
Eric and Shelly's romance is short-lived. The film's bad guy, Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), is trying to prevent a cell phone video from leaking out. Shelly has the video saved on her phone. The video's contents aren't revealed until near the end of the picture. When they are revealed, it's not much of a surprise. It takes a while for this film to reach the point where the original did. It's not until an hour through that our two heroes are whacked. Something that the original opened with.
Instead, we spend time developing a relationship with no chemistry. I thought Brits could act, But FKA twigs' performance as Shelly is drier than paint. She speaks almost on a single note throughout the picture. Bill Skarsgård plays everything so moody that he loses touch with what made Brandon Lee's performance so special in the first place. Although gothic, Lee's depiction of Eric was also humorous and charming. In Skarsgård's defense, Eric simply isn't written that way in this film. Instead, he comes off like a crackhead psychopath with no redeemable qualities other than feeling bad for a dying horse when he was a kid. He also looks like Jared Leto’s Joker from Suicide Squad.
The overall plot of the film gets muddled in a subplot that explains why Eric and Shelly were killed when I simply didn't care. Danny Houston's Vincent Roeg is a classy step above Michael Wincott's Top Dollar. Still, Houston's prestigious, high society character doesn't contain that voice that only Wincott's Marlboro Red hoarseness has that makes Top Dollar so memorable. He's also just hilarious. "Quick impression for ya. CAW! CAW! BANG! F***, I'M DEAD!" That moment will never be topped. I appreciate them trying to make a radically different villain, but he's too generic. Vincent Roeg is the typical manipulative rich guy who happens to have a superpower of mind control. Neat angle, but he just doesn't have Top Dollar's charisma.
With a flat cast, the film also lacks any style. Alex Proyas' original film felt like an R-rated Gotham City mixed with Blade Runner. The sky is always raining. Lights bounce and illuminate from Top Dollar's nightclub to his office, looking like something from a gothic nightmare. The film comes from an era of Hollywood filmmaking where everything was expressionistic more than practical. It's when large sets were used instead of real locations. It gave the films a certain distinction to them that filming in Prague won't get you. The new Crow tries to make a more grounded approach, but The Crow isn't supposed to be grounded. It's meant to be a grim look at a decaying America. Removing Detroit as the central city in the remake and replacing it with a nondescript location removes its identity.
Even Volker Bertelmann's score feels flat, copying a singular popular lower horn tune instead of giving us something diverse with heavenly, satanic, and rocking compositions in Graeme Revell's original score. There is a moment in the new Crow that may have topped the original's action involving a massacre in an opera. It's way more brutal than anything from the '94 film and delivers in a single scene what I think the Producer's vision for the movie was. Unfortunately that scene isn't enough to carry what's an otherwise dull picture that tries hard to be something meaningful but comes across as generic.
