The Crow (2024) Review

The Crow reboot has spent a long time in development, having directors like Stephen Norrington (Blade), Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (28 Weeks Later), and Corin Hardy (The Nun) and stars as Bradley Cooper, Luke Evans, and Jason Momoa attached. It finally came to life with Rupert Sanders directing and Bill Skarsgård in the title role.

Eric Draven (Skarsgård) is incarnated at a rehab facility where he meets Shelly (FKA Twigs), a woman arrested when she was running away from a Satanic cult. When the pair break out of their captivity, they experience their love for each other in the city. However, the cult finally catches up to the pair, Shelly is murdered and Eric gets sent to limbo and tasked with a mission of vengeance so he could save Shelly’s soul.

The idea of a Crow reboot has been met with hostility. The 1994 adaptation is a cult classic that is held in high regard and has the shadow of Brandon Lee’s death lingering over it. The original Crow was a simple revenge tale that was notable because of its gothic art design and colourful characters. Any reboot would face an uphill battle. The Youtuber In/Frame/Out pointed out in his retrospective of the Crow movies that they all have the same story; a man is resurrected from the dead so they can enact vengeance for a loved one. The Crow’s (2024) troubled production was evident by the many executive producers connected to the film.

The Crow (2024) had a late review embargo which is never a good sign about a film’s quality and critics have eviscerated it. Even Empire gave the film a one-star review. So, I will start with the positives. I liked that the reboot was brutally violent with moments that did make me wince. This violence was fully implicated in an action scene at the opera. It was a mix of John Wick, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, and Quantum of Solace. It was a shame the rest of the film couldn’t match this.

The Crow (2024) was meant to be a comic-book action film, but it was disappointing on this front. There were only three action scenes in the film and only one was notable. It’s not enough to sustain this type of film. This was close to what the 2015 version of Fantastic Four achieved and that film’s director could pin the blame on the reshoots and studio interference. The original Crow was a B-Movie that nearly got a straight-to-video release made on a modest budget and it had solid action sequences.

The original Crow served as a great example of economical storytelling. It was 100 minutes long and it told a good crime/comic book story that established Eric and Shelly as characters and an emotional anchor with Sarah. The Crow (2024) was longer yet it had less to say. The reboot spends more time establishing the relationship between Eric and Shelly by showing how they got together, but it felt like The Crow (2024) was acting as the warm-up show to Joker: Folie à Deux.

The people who made The Crow (2024) didn’t understand the comic books or the original film. This film aimed to expand on the mythology of the world by showing Eric going into the astral plane and being told what he needed to do, taking away any agenda Eric was meant to have. The villain of the film was Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), a Satanist who harvested the souls of innocent people by sending them to hell. This turned The Crow (2024) into the comic book version of What Dreams May Come, a supernatural love story about saving someone’s soul, not a vengeance story about a tortured soul.

The Crow (2024) was filmed in Prague and Bavaria and this led to some interesting casting and directing choices. It was set in an American city but the cast was a mishmash of Europeans. Skarsgård and Huston as Americans, yet the other actors kept their natural accents, even the English actors who might have been able to perform with an American accent. Except for Skarsgård and Huston, the cast was a mixed bag. Skarsgård has proven himself a perfectly capable actor and he was fine as an emo action hero and Huston got to perform his fourth villainous comic-book role, the previous three being in 30 Days of Night, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and Wonder Woman. FKA Twigs has been known as a singer and doesn’t have many acting credits. Her performance in the film made it clear that she still had a lot of work to do as an actress since she was stiff in the film.

Rupert Sanders seems to be a director who wants to take on undesirable projects. His previous films were Snow White and the Huntsman, a fantasy film made at the height of the “dark and gritty” era of blockbuster cinema, and the live-action adaptation of The Ghost in the Shell which took a daring approach to the whitewashing accusations. Sanders’ previous work has been visually distinctive even if the narrative has been lacking. The Crow (2024) didn’t even have a strong visual style to help it stand out.

Fans of The Crow comics and the 1994 will hate this attempt to reboot a property they love, whilst newcomers will not be won over. It copied the same mistakes as two other flops of 2024, Madame Web and Borderlands where the source material wasn’t respected and being action-lite action movies.