Soulmates Eric (Skarsgård) and Shelly (FKA twigs) are brutally murdered when the demons of her dark past catch up with them. Given the chance to save his true love by sacrificing himself, Eric sets out to seek merciless revenge on their killers, traversing the worlds of the living and the dead to put the wrong things right.
- Based on the comic book series and comic strip The Crow by James O'Barr.
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When I first saw the trailer for The Crow (2024), I was kind of irritated. After all, I feel like there are some movies that shouldn’t be remade. Either they were done well the first time (so no update needed), or there was a tragic event during filming. Both are true in the case of The Crow. Brandon Lee, who passed away during filming due to a tragic accident on set, truly embodied James O’Barr’s character. While the film did change a few things from the original story, they got most of it right. So what would be the point of redoing it?
Bill Skarsgard has started making a habit of doing reboots. Everyone knows him from It (2017) and It Chapter Two (where he couldn’t compete with Tim Curry’s Pennywise from IT). Now he’s taken on Brandon Lee’s role of Eric Draven. This time, however, The Crow (2024) is so vastly different from The Crow, it’s almost a completely different character. He looks emancipated and drug-addled for most of the film, leaving viewers hard-pressed to want to root for this guy. With Eric’s new demeanor, it seems more like he probably would have done all this killing anyway – and might have in one of his previous drug-addled rages.
The rest of the cast really boils down to only a couple of people. Danny Huston, as the bad guy, is understatedly evil, and classes up The Crow (2024) more than it deserves – so he feels a bit out of place. FKA twigs, as the love interest Shelly, actual does hold the viewer’s interest, and makes up for a lot that Bill’s Eric is lacking. She makes the monster human – and that’s before he turns into the title character. The rest are largely forgettable, with no memorable performances from anyone. They are just flashes on screen, quickly fading from memory after they’re gone.
The storyline in The Crow (2024) takes the original idea and tosses it out of the window, picking and choosing which bits to save. The couple is still murdered, Eric comes back from the dead, and he hunts down the people that killed them. The rest, however, is completely made up mumbo jumbo, mostly centering around doing the devil’s work and trading souls like they were playing cards. Apparently, having an anti-hero avenging the death of a loved one isn’t good enough for the younger generations – now the good guy now has to defeat the greater evil. Oh yeah, and the hero has to doubt what he’s doing more. Heck, the bad guy isn’t even the biggest threat to Eric – it’s Eric himself. Ugh.
The special effects are good in The Crow (2024), but since the story goes off-the-rails not long after Eric’s resurrection, most of them are put to ill use. After all, if the viewer stops paying attention, no matter how many splashy effects are thrown up on the screen, they won’t resonate as well, and the viewer won’t pay them as much mind. And that kicks off right from the start, as the opening title sequence tries to rip off the intro to Marvel’s Daredevil (TV) – and doesn’t match up.
Sadly, I didn’t have high expectations going in to this, and The Crow (2024) actually managed to be worse than I expected. I was expecting a reboot that probably wouldn’t match up, but at least would be somewhat comparable. Instead, we got a brand new script that decided Eric rising from the dead wasn’t enough supernatural, and had to throw in their own new storyline, saving only the bits they liked – and had to turn him into a drug-addled loser with depression. That’s just plain dumb. But I guess that’s Hollywood for you – after all, it’s an excuse to keep milking this cash cow, even though the milk has long since dried up. Give up.
Oh, and Bill? How about staying away from reboots for awhile? No, you decided to go with Nosferatu (2024). Oh. Well, since that worked at the box office, I guess you’re sticking with re-hashing old stuff by playing Pennywise (again) in the upcoming show It: Welcome to Derry (TV). Haven’t we had enough, reboot king?
