Bill Skarsgård and FKA twigs in a scene from The Crow.Larry Horricks/Supplied
- The Crow
- Directed by Rupert Sanders
- Written by Zach Baylin and William Schneider
- Starring Bill Skarsgård, FKA twigs and Danny Huston
- Classification 14A; 111 minutes
- Opens in theatres Aug. 23
Make no mistake: the on-set death of Brandon Lee is the very worst thing to happen when it comes to the Crow franchise.
At just 28, the rising actor was ripped from this world while filming a gunfire scene for director Alex Proyas’s 1994 film, the fatal accident landing like the punchline to an especially cruel joke given that his father, martial arts legend Bruce Lee, died at the age of 32. Nothing can possibly compare in terms of pure, brutal injustice. And yet, director Rupert Sanders sure seems to try his very best to conjure the second-worst thing to ever involve The Crow with his new reboot, which completely and shamelessly sullies the legacy of both the original movie and its star.
Incoherent and cheap, with its aesthetic sensibilities seemingly cribbed from an elevator pitch of “John Wick goes goth,” Sanders’s version of The Crow is a truly ugly thing to endure. The movie not only misinterprets the tragic romance of James O’Barr’s original comic book series, but does so in such a brazenly soulless manner that you wonder if anyone involved – from Sanders and his screenwriters to the comically high number of producers who give themselves priority billing in the opening credits over the cast – has ever actually seen a movie before. This is as much a cry for help as it is an exercise in intellectual property malpractice.
The Crow is a reboot of the 1994 film that tragically starred Brandon Lee.Larry Horricks/Supplied
The basics of the original story are here, albeit assembled with hasty indifference. Almost every other scene appears to be missing the essential narrative tissue that connects it to the one before, as if the production’s editing room was transformed into a bloody arena in which no party emerged the victor.
To start: we meet a troubled young man Eric (Bill Skarsgård) in a fancy rehab centre. Why he’s there, we never find out. But boy, does he have a lot of cool-looking tattoos. Soon enough, Eric connects with Shelly (musician FKA twigs), who is locked up alongside him because, uh, she was fleeing a literally demonic gangster (Danny Huston), bumped into some cops on the street who found her stash of drugs and was tossed into the clinic instead of being arraigned. The details don’t matter because, in the world of Sanders’s film, nothing matters. It is a free-for-all of cut-to-the-chase nonsense.
Quickly, Eric and Shelly escape the confines of rehab, settling into a whirlwind romance that plays like an 11-year-old boy’s idea of a passionate fling. The pair flit between dark nightclub embraces, lazy days reading medieval literature in the woods alongside nameless extras, and lounging around each other’s fabulously appointed apartments (his: warehouse-cyberpunk chic, hers: bohemian Restoration Hardware).
The carelessness in plot, character, set design and performance only metastasizes from there, up to and beyond the point that Eric and Shelly are murdered by Huston’s thugs. Once Eric is given a shot at supernatural revenge through the mystical powers of the title bird, most moviegoers will be begging to eat, rather than watch, this Crow.
What follows is a dirge of sloppy, choppy violence as Eric goes to town on countless henchmen. While Sanders (also responsible for the creatively sterile live-action Ghost in the Shell adaptation) seems to think that he’s hit the jackpot with an opera-house-set melee late in the film, the sequence only boasts one truly inventive kill. And even then the effect is blunted by obvious and shlocky CGI.
If Sanders’s goal was to honour Brandon Lee’s memory, he has failed. And if he merely hoped to entertain Hot Topic-frequenting teens who have no knowledge of the original film, he has failed, too. There’s just one bird in The Crow, and far too many stones.