It’s hard to believe anyone would bother waking up for The Crow, let alone return from the dead.
For a film where the hero’s motivation is explicitly “to put the wrong things right”, The Crow sure lets a lot of the right things go wrong in this re-adaptation of the original 1989 comic (don’t call it a remake).
When he and his girlfriend Shelly (FKA Twigs) is brutally murdered for something she witnessed, Eric (Bill Skarsgård) finds himself in limbo and offered the chance to return from death to save Shelly’s soul and take revenge on Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), a demonic crime lord who’s sold his soul to the Devil for eternal life.
The Crow certainly lives up to its unkillable reputation, with its sixteen-year troubled journey back to the big screen. In fact, it’s a film that’s been so thoroughly and comprehensively made that the opening titles list every single one of the many, many, executive producers, associate producers and actual producers before it lists any of the cast but even then, that’s not quite as on the nose as the opening visuals which literally try to flog the audience a dead horse.
In its defence, it does try to invest time in developing Eric and Shelly’s relationship but it’s a sub-prime investment at best. FKA Twigs lives up to her nom de scene by being so wooden it’s a surprise she can sink in the waters of the afterlife and she’s matched in her disengaged performance by a surprisingly torpid Bill Skarsgård. There’s none of the off-kilter, dangerous edge he brought to bear in the likes of John Wick Chapter 4, Boy Kills World or It. Instead, he seems numbed by the material and disengaged from the emotional core that should drive The Crow forward. Together, the pair concoct a chemical romance that’s almost entirely inert, and when the film plays with the idea of Eric’s love for Shelly wavering, it’s less a tragic turn of events and more an unsurprising inevitability.
For all the effort it puts into shoring up the faltering romance, it neglects most of the supporting characters including the villain. Danny Huston growls and grumbles his way through the material like a lazy reprise of his Wonder Woman character by way of Joss Ackland’s De Nomolos but his motivations and organisation remain frustratingly opaque and arbitrary and it’s a crime that the luminous Josette Simon gets so little to do, although she brings a tremendous and much needed sense of class and gravitas to The Crow for the brief moments she’s on the screen.
The pacing is terribly uneven too, with long periods of soporific melancholy punctuated by bouts of extremely brutal and bloody violence, none of which has the necessary edge of wit and creativity to escape the feeling of being gratuitous for gratuity’s sake. Even that, though, isn’t enough to bring the film to life and its ultimate failure is that it’s pretty damned boring. It’s got the production values, for sure, but there’s no substance supporting the style and the only thing that will linger in your thoughts as you leave the cinema is an urge to revisit the 1994 original.
