Directed by Rupert Sanders

Full disclosure, I have not seen the 90s cult classic The Crow, starring the late Brandon Lee. I’m familiar with it by reputation of course, a gothic action thriller with a tragic tale of an on-set accident that cut Lee’s life short, it’s reason enough to not want to touch the franchise again, even if there were already sequels without Lee. Good taste never stopped Hollywood, so our good friends at Lionsgate decided the world needed a new The Crow, this time with Bill Skarsgard. Skarsgard is fresh off the quite fun Boy Kills World, so I was hoping that this might be a similarly enjoyable cheesy action movie. Boy, was I wrong.

We first meet Eric Draven (Skarsgard) as a child, a boy who is sad about a horse being injured. His sad life continues, and he finds himself in a rehabilitation center/prison where he meets…okay, I forgot her name but she’s played by FKA Twigs, also in rehab. When FKA’s dark and mysterious past catches up with her, she and Eric decide to break out and run away back to NYC, a task that proves to be shockingly easy. While the two enjoy a life of drugs and partying on someone else’s dime, FKA’s past catches up with her, and the two young lovers are slain by evil goons. Eric Draven returns though, as he accepts an offer from a mysterious otherworldly being to come back to life long enough to right the wrongs of their murder.

Sounds like a simple premise, right? But there’s nothing wrong with that at all! As long as you can convince me these two are in love and then whip out some schlocky gothic action, well by golly you got yourself a fun film! Unfortunately, the first of The Crow’s many many problems rears its ugly head, which is that I never for a second bought that these two characters were in love. Maybe it’s because their plotline is about two drug-addicted people who escaped rehab solving all their problems with drugs and partying, maybe it’s because Skarsgard and FKA have zero chemistry, I can’t rightly say. But I can say that this is a huge problem because fully half the movie is these two floating through the plot and doing their best to act in love, a half that drags like roadkill caught on the back bumper of a pickup.

Once that half finishes and the aforementioned evil goons kill both of our heroes(?) we enter the gothic action half of the film. A half that, I am sad to say, is mostly a brooding Bill Skarsgard walking places while ‘investigating’ the killers. I put investigating in quotes because he kind of just stumbles into everything and luckily finds the locations of the killers, whereupon he’s usually shot several times before he stands back up and kills his opponents. It’s awesome and not monotonous, not even slightly! There’s a brief glimmer of cheesy schlock when Skarsgard grabs a katana and uses it against a horde of goons, but you can’t even enjoy that because the goons he uses it against may not even have any connection to the killers, as they seem to just be actual security guards at an opera venue.

But wait, you might ask, with hope brimming behind the eyes of an innocent who hasn’t seen The Crow, that’s just the plot, characters, and action, how are the other parts of the movie, how is that gothic atmosphere? Non-existent is the easy answer. The setting is boilerplate NYC, with no real flourishes or artistic license taken to make it look like anything else. Looking like something else may have cost some money, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t do it, after all, the rest of the production looks so cheap that I bet they figured why even bother trying to dress it up at that point? It already feels like a soulless cash grab, may as well have it look like one!

Couple that all with the standard workmanlike cinematography and the incredibly bland dialogue and writing, it doesn’t matter much that I generally think Bill Skarsgard is a good actor. He has nothing to do, nothing to work with besides alternating between smoldering and brooding, something made even sillier by his tattoos that look straight out of the Joker from Suicide Squad. I hate to be negative but FKA Twigs cannot act. At all. It seems like she’s trying but can’t get a single emotion out, which is especially bad as she’s supposed to be a tortured artist.

One weird thing about The Crow is its main villain, an evil businessman/gang leader who possesses evil magics, allegedly from a pact with The Devil. I don’t dislike the concept of this villain, whose powers seem to be using his evil voice to mind control people to do bad things so that they go to hell, which gets him more time on Earth, but I don’t know how much I like him in this movie. His plotline kind of overcomplicates the story, which should be a simple revenge tale, and that especially happens when he learns about Eric’s pseudo-immortality and becomes interested in trying to harness it for himself. It almost feels like this should be in a The Crow sequel and not the original film. Let the first one be about the building of the legend of The Crow, a seemingly unkillable dark avenger who takes the fight to street-level bad guys, and then as that legend grows an occultist learns about it and targets Eric. That seems like a more logical progression to me, but I’m no writer.

The final thing I’ll comment on is the score. It’s an appropriately moody collection of goffik jams and for what it was I didn’t have a problem with it.

One of the most disheartening things about The Crow’s release is that Lionsgate absolutely knew they had a bomb on their hands because they had a review embargo in place until Thursday night at 7pm, so critics couldn’t even post reviews until after the movie already opened. What a scummy way to try to shakedown moviegoers who don’t know better. Bottom line, The Crow is dull, bland, and pointless with only slight glimmers of hope in an otherwise painful experience. The Crow is so disappointing it should’ve been called The Turkey. Yeah, that’s a bad joke but The Crow doesn’t deserve a better one.