Bill Skarsgård and FKA Twigs star in a reboot of The Crow franchise, and that’s all we’ll say on the matter. Here’s our The Crow (2024) review.
The spectre of a certain caped crusader haunts both versions of The Crow, for entirely different reasons.
Alex Proyas’ 1994 original took visual inspiration from Tim Burton’s Batman, its gothic, German expressionism-tinged theatricality and frenetic editing style lending its violent revenge tale a fascinating identity which has stood the test of time.
Rupert Sanders’ 2024 interpretation of James O’Barr’s comic book series reboots the five-film franchise, and takes some inspiration from Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, in that it takes place in a fairly nondescript, recognisably modern city. In Nolan’s films, this ordinariness felt intentional.
For those who found the first The Crow a little light on plot, not to worry: Sanders’ film puts it all back in for you. This unfortunately means that a few things were thrown out to make space (character development, entertaining action sequences, thematic undertones and any colour other than grey, for example), but that only leaves room for such entertaining scenes as “protagonist visits friend to borrow a gun”, “villain takes a phone call” and “20 minutes of the worst flirting you’ve ever seen”.
Largely (and I do mean largely) abandoning the set-up of the original, 2024 swaps a gang of entertainingly psychotic anarchists for a middle-aged villain in a suit (Danny Huston). He’s done a deal with the devil (we presume biblical) where he finds innocent people to send down to hell so he doesn’t have to go there himself. One word from him forces his victims to end their own lives. Interestingly, though this seems to be his only career path, it must be a lucrative one: he has henchmen and a taste for classical music and everything.
But this nefarious evildoer has a thorn in his side. FKA Twigs’ Shelly has a video which, should it come to light, will end his satanic mischief for good (it later transpires that this plot point is entirely irrelevant). On the run from his goons, she’s picked up by the police, who take her to a rehab centre which hasn’t quite decided whether it’s actually a prison (there’s a barbed wire fence, the guards are abusive, wrong-‘uns bully weaker patients in the showers, everyone wears prison uniforms and are confined to cells, but they offer group therapy sessions and everyone calls it rehab, so it’s pretty ambiguous).
At “rehab”, Shelly meets Bill Skarsgård’s Eric. In this version of the story, he isn’t a rock guitarist pulling himself from a shallow grave, but a man with lots of tattoos. This is less interesting than it sounds. Where Brandon Lee’s exceptional turn in the original now bears a striking similarity to Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight, this interpretation looks a lot like Jared Leto in Suicide Squad. With a thousand apologies to Mr Skarsgård, the character is almost preposterously dull.
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Inevitably, Eric and Shelly fall in love and escape together. The latter is surprisingly easy (they climb over a fence), which makes the former the more impressive of the two. With emo-diary dialogue like “I thought you were quite brilliantly broken” and an idea of crazed debauchery which involves sharing a single bottle of Prosecco and wearing a stranger’s dressing gown, the film has now been running for what must be close to a half hour before the inciting incident finally kicks off the story proper.
The move into act two signals the end of the most interesting aspects of The Crow (2024). What follows is a series of instantly forgettable fight scenes strung together by redundant, expository conversations and just enough CGI blood splatter to guarantee an 18-certificate. It treats subtext like the instruction manual for a U-boat, and has the entertainment value to match. I found myself wishing I could rearrange the scenes into an order, any order, other than the one presented to me – anything to eke something original from a film less a feathery black than a ponderous sludge of grey.
I don’t think this film is very good.
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