In the long and winding road it took to finally get to “The Crow” — with some 15 years of recasts, rewrites, and director switches — the one constant that has remained is that this version would not be a remake of the 1994 film of the same name. It would, the mantra went, instead be a reimagining of the original comic book series by James O’Barr about a man, resurrected from the dead, enacting vengeance on the small-time gangsters who killed him and his fiancée.
It’s a sensible distinction to make for any movie revamp, but here is a particularly important and likely futile disclaimer to evade existing in the shadow not only of a cult classic, but also of a tragic and storied legacy — the accidental on-set death of its star, Brandon Lee — that shrouded and ultimately fueled the original film’s beloved status. “The Crow” of 2024 was never meant to be, couldn’t ever be, a version of that movie, a grittily stylized, rough-edged gothic melodrama whose pain and grief was so deeply absorbed by fans because those very things bled beyond the frame.
That, of course, is fine and all. But ultimately what this version, directed by Rupert Sanders, is spiritually derived from is neither the film nor the comic, but rather the flattened popular image that the film produced — a Hot Topic-style version of alternative consciousness.
“Do you think angsty teens would build shrines to us?” Shelly (FKA twigs) asks Eric (Bill Skarsgard) about their love story, the film’s central romance, whose edgy sensitivity is packaged with as much real feeling as a perfume ad starring Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox. You might think of Shelly’s line as a kind of wink at how Lee’s image became a beacon for brooding cynicism for an entire generation.
But the real punchline is that the film itself is the embodiment of that kind of hollow emo teen worship, throwing vague echoes of “Joker,” “John Wick” and “Constantine” into a laundry machine and hoping faded shades of black eyeliner remain.
When Shelly asks Eric this question, she’s struggling to tell him about her dark past. The two lost souls met while in rehab — Shelly reeling Eric in like a manic pixie dream girl that might have indeed sprouted from the mind of an angsty teen — but what Shelly has done was motivated by a darker figure, a spiritual entity named Vincent (Danny Huston) who, having made a pact with the devil, controls and discards innocent lives. Vincent’s henchmen eventually come for both Shelly and Eric, killing them. Eric, though, is brought out of purgatory after being promised that he can resurrect Shelly if he defeats Vincent.
It’s a far cry from the source material’s small story of vigilantism, largely taking the namesake of The Crow and slapping it onto a thinly stylized supernatural superhero movie. The kernel that it hopes to keep, and the heart that made the imperfect 1994 film lastingly resonant, is what it most egregiously bastardizes: the twin forces of love and grief, and the senseless rage borne from real-life tragedy.
Whether real or fictional, true pain had always been what brought The Crow out of the grave and gave his story meaning. In this revamp, he’s been dug up to put on a Halloween costume.
The Crow
Rated R for strong violence, language, sexuality, nudity and drug use. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters.
Read More: ‘The Crow’ Review: Resurrected and It Feels So Bad
