The Crow (2024)

Even with low expectations, this remake feels like a wasted opportunity, with little to recommend watching it for.

Premise:  After meeting and falling in love while in a drug rehabilitation centre, Eric Draven (Bill Skarsgård) and Shelly Webster (FKA Twigs) breakout to flee from those hunting Shelly on behalf of the mysterious Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston).  When Roeg’s forces eventually find and murder the couple, Eric is offered the chance to return from the dead to kill Roeg and be reunited with Shelly.

Review:

I’m not someone who is automatically predisposed to dislike remakes, so I went into this reboot hoping for the best, especially as I respected Bill Skarsgård’s previous work, and I’m actually one of the few people who really enjoyed director Rupert Sanders’ live-action remake of Ghost in the Shell.  But perhaps the fact that this remake had been in development for 16 years (since Stephen Norrington was first linked to it in 2008) should have been a red flag.

I can certainly see what director Rupert Sanders and writers Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider were trying to do in this movie, which they’ve described as a new adaptation of the original graphic novel, rather than a remake of the cult 1994 version of The Crow.  But even that sentiment doesn’t make much sense – the 1994 film was relatively faithful to the graphic novel in terms of its characters and plot, whereas this 2024 version bears even less resemblance to the graphic novel outside of the names of the two main characters.

“…Eric & Shelly’s relationship is woefully underwritten…”

Another thing that’s it’s clear that the filmmakers were trying to do was to make Shelly much more of a central character, presumably to avoid the allegation that her murder is another example of a film where a female character is “fridged” just to give the male protagonist emotional motivation.  For this reason, we spend much more time with Eric and Shelly before their murder (which only happens right at the end of Act 1), presumably with the intention that audiences would also grow attached to Shelly and share in Eric’s pain when she’s taken from him.

Which is a nice idea … except that Eric and Shelly’s relationship is woefully underwritten, and Shelly herself is (IMHO) a rather irritating character (for example, having said that a friend lets her crash at his apartment when he’s out of town, she then proceeds to trash the apartment while they’re staying there!).  I don’t necessarily blame FKA twigs for this (I’ve not seen her in anything else, so I can’t say much about how good an actress she is in other things), but the dialogue she’s given to work with here is fairly leaden.  Then there’s the murders themselves – and look, I hate torture-porn horror films, and I don’t like revelling in violence inflicted on any character … but in the original The Crow, the trauma of Shelly’s assault and murder, and the pain that she suffered, was felt viscerally by the audience so that they could empathise with Eric’s quest for vengeance.  In this 2024 remake, Shelly is given (by movie standards) a fairly painless and relatively quick death – which combined with the fact that I felt quite relieved that I wouldn’t have to spend any more time with that character meant that I really wasn’t emotionally engaged in what followed.

“…only in the last 25 minutes or so does Eric Draven go ‘full Crow’…”

Especially when what follows is … not particularly exciting either.  For the middle section of the film, Eric mopes about after being resurrected by a mysterious spirit guide and sent on a mission, not for vengeance, but as a supernatural enforcer who’s offered the chance to be reunited with Shelly in return for killing Vincent Roeg, the crime boss who murdered them.  Danny Huston can always be relied upon to play a good villain, but as Roeg he too doesn’t get much material to work with, and the details of his backstory and the ‘rules’ for his powers remain frustratingly vague and ill-defined throughout.

It's only in the last 25 minutes or so that Eric Draven goes ‘full Crow’ – and the Opera-house-set final showdown (which is featured heavily in the trailers) is well-staged and by far the best part of the film … but by then, it really is too little too late.  One visceral and blood-soaked action sequence does not a good film make.

“…perhaps the most disappointing film of 2024…”

At the end of the day, The Crow probably isn’t the worst film of 2024 … but given the people involved and the affection that many still have for the 1994 version, this reboot is perhaps the most disappointing film of 2024.