Bird Fight: Crow v Crow

In my review of the 2024 The Crow I couldn’t help but draw some comparisons to the 1994 film. The production draws the comparisons, of course, because it’s a reboot of the film (and the comic of the same name), playing with the characters of Eric and Shelley in a new version of a similar tale. I tried to evaluate the new movie on its own terms while acknowledging that the film would struggle to break free of the legacy it’s playing in. And that’s true: you can’t make a movie named The Crow without the ghost of Brandon Lee being evoked. Even the sequels to the original film couldn’t escape that.

Still, while we’re here, it helps to explain, from the perspective of a fan of the original movie, just where this film falters. There are multiple issues, many of them hard to ignore, so we’re going to go over all the major ones we can to discuss just why this film fails so hard:

The Mood is Wrong

Whether you like the original 1994 film or not, there’s no denying that the film managed to strike a specific mood. The film, directed by Alex Proyas, had a very evocative feel to it, tapping into that specific Goth-Grunge aesthetic that feels very 1990s even today. But it works. It’s a moody and dark and tangible vibe that suits a superhero dressed in leather that came back from the dead to seek revenge. The film finds that vibe and works it through every frame, creating something singular and interesting, one of the best adult superhero movies to come out until Blade arrived on the scene a few years later (and that film tapped into a similar vibe).

The city in The Crow ‘94 feels both lived in and like a set piece. Bradon Lee’s hero stalks the rooftops like he’s walking along props and models. The crow flies through the cityscape as if everything is perfectly made to look fake. It’s weird, and dreamlike, a translation of a fictional world that doesn’t deny the fact that it’s fictional. It’s clearly made to look like a storybook, tapping into the sense of its comic without simply being an animated, black-and-white, movie. It looks great, even decades later, because it works within its means to craft its reality.

And the soundtrack is just legit. An album packed with hits and covers, from Nine Inch Nails, The Cure, Stone Temple Pilots, and even My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult and Pantera. The film wraps its music around itself, using the songs and score to work the mood of its scene. There are iconic scenes with Nine Inch Nail’s cover of “Dead Souls” playing, action sequences that come alive with pulsing rock. It all just works to the film’s benefit, never losing sight of the story it’s telling.

This is a big part of what’s missing from the new film. Where the original film had this strange sense of reality that made the film into a storybook, the new film feels painfully generic, set in a dull reality that doesn’t match the fiction of the story. The new The Crow could exist in any setting, in any city, matching the grim and boring aesthetic of Zack Snyder’s DC Extended UniverseStarted as DC Comics' answer to the MCU, the early films in the franchise stumbled out of the gates, often mired in grim-dark storytelling and the rushed need to get this franchise started. Eventually, though, the films began to even out, becoming better as they went along. Still, this franchise has a long way to go before it's true completion for Marvel's universe. films. There’s no sense of style or substance that really suits the story. It lacks the artisticness of the original, and it ends up feeling like every other superhero film we’ve all grown so tired of.

And beyond that, the soundtrack sucks. The best that the film can boast is songs from Joy Division (who wrote the original version of “Dead Souls”, although the song included in the film is “Disorder”) and Gary Numan. But beyond that we get a bunch of B-grade bands with songs chosen for their titles and not how they work within the film. Tracks like “The Killer” from Phil Kieran and Aaron Thomas, Traitrs with “Thin Flesh”, “Total Depravity” by The Veils, and Cascadur’s “Meaning”. And while I’m not saying that, on their own, they are bad songs. They just don’t evoke a proper mood in this new film. The only time we get something that really suits a scene it’s during an opera near the end of the movie. It’s nowhere near as interesting.

The Characters Don’t Work

Part of the appeal of the original film was that you cared about the characters. While we don’t see Shelley for much of the film, we do get introduced to her in a nice scene she shares with Sarah (who isn’t even in the new movie), showing a sisterly bond between them. We also get a sense of her love for Eric through the brief scenes she has, and how much he cares for her as well. We learn they’re good people, fighting a corrupt land developer for their friends and neighbors.

Their cause is just, which is what makes their deaths have meaning. The attack she and Eric suffers is rough and brutal and it adds to the fear and panic of the scene. When Eric comes back, we understand why he wants to kill to avenge her, what he lost, why he cares so much. Brandon Lee’s performance helps, of course, being both warm as a friend to Sarah, pained at the love he lost, and vengeful when on the attack. Brandon sells the character, which in turn makes his scenes have more impact. It all comes together to strike a lead we really care about.

I don’t care about the leads in The Crow ‘24. It’s not that I think Skarsgård or Twigs are bad actors on their own, and I can sense they really want to sell their characters in this film, but they just don’t work in context. For starters, the film hides what happened to Shelley, not even revealing the crime that happened that put her on the run. And when it is finally revealed, the twist of it (that she was brainwashed via the villain’s magic power such that she kills someone else) is already blunted by seeing similar scenes with other characters. Why it’s hidden makes no sense, but the act, the murder, also blunts her character.

Now, had she been the hero of the movie, trying to take her power back and find vengeance for herself (as well as maybe her murdered lover) then that would work, but, as I noted in my review, Shelley isn’t the heroine of the film. She dies halfway in and Eric takes over as the lead, this despite the fact that Shelley gets all the character development. She has an arc we can see, one that could make her into an interesting hero, but instead she’s fridged so that Eric can have his story as the hero. If he had died and Shelley had continued on, I could have seen that being a fairly interesting swerve that would have made the film far more interesting and engaging.

Since the film decided to focus on Eric, it needed to build him as a more interesting character. All we know about him is one very brief flashback to a time when he lived in a trailer with his mother, who ignored him, and he loved a horse very much… right up until it had to be put down (we guess) because it got caught in barb wire and tore up its leg. After that, he’s in the rehab center, and his character development completely stops. Why is he there? What happened between the time he was a kid and now to put him in the path of Shelley? None of that is explained, and Eric remains this complete void through and through. We need a stronger character to lead our film.

Compare this to Eric in the 1994 movie. We know he loved Shelley and the two were going to get married. We see how protective he is of her from the way he fights to get to her during the attack. We see that he loves Sara like a little sister, and he protects and defends her too. We feel his grief, his pain, his desire for revenge. Hell, we even know background details about him, like how he was in a band and that he was moderately famous (even having at least one album). That’s way more shading than Eric ever gets in the 2024 film. It’s enough to make him feel complete, unlike the later hero.

And the Villains are Worse

But I think what really drags the newer film down is that you don’t even have anyone to root against. The villain of The Crow ‘24 is Vincent Roeg, a rich business man who does… well, we actually never learn what he does. He’s rich, and he likes music, and that’s as much background shading as we get. The important detail about him is that he has some kind of deal with the Devil (or Hell, or a demon, or someone) which gives him the power to contort people’s minds. He can make them do things, like commit murder or suicide. He uses this power so that the souls of the innocent get corrupted and sent down to the bad place. And in exchange, we’re left to suppose, he gets money and power.

Note this is all far more explanation that the film gives us. We just have to infer a lot of it because the film doesn’t feel the need to actually let us in on the motivations or story of the character. Don’t get me wrong, I like it when a film is able to let information trickle out, avoiding the desire to force feed us a bunch of exposition to explain everything. But that implies information is trickling out, and this film doesn’t even go that far. We know nothing about Roeg beyond his power and the fact, as he tells us, he has a deal to corrupt souls, and he literally says this so we know. That’s bad character development, and it leaves Roeg as thinly sketched as Eric in this film.

Worse, Roeg doesn’t even have a colorful cast of flunkies to help him out. He has people that do his bidding, all of them basically nameless, business-suited goons who walk around looking very expensive while being very ineffectual at their jobs. They don’t come across as anything more than fodder for Eric to eventually kill because they have even less development and shading than Eric himself. Nothing about these villains stands out or is interesting. And when you compare them to the goons in The Crow ‘94 – Tin Tin, Funboy, T-Bird, and Skank, along with their drug-dealing corporate leader, Top Dollar, and his creepy sister, Myca – it seems like the newer film missed the point of the characters and their setting, sucking all the fun out in the process.

It’s Just Not Enjoyable

Fun, I think, is the key thing this film is missing. The Crow ‘24 is a dour and drab affair that wants to be a serious and high-minded film about a dude that can’t die on a quest for revenge against the men that wronged him. Eric in this film is basically Deadpool, just without any of the wit or entertainment to go along with it. If you remade Deadpool as a sad and tedious affair that no one wanted to watch, you’d have The Crow ‘24.

Really, it’s impressive that Lionsgate was able to crank out two soulless superhero cash-grabs in one year, both of them clearly trying, and failing, to do what Marvel did. One is The Crow which desperately wants to be the serious version of Deadpool and the other was Borderlands which tried so hard to be Guardians of the Galaxy but failed to deliver on any of the fun of the concept. In both cases audiences saw exactly what they were going to get and stayed far away, leaving Liongate’s superhero ambitions rotting in the gutter.

As I’ve said before, it’s not that audiences are suffering from superhero fatigue, they’re just tired of bad superhero films. The Crow is a bad superhero film, made by a company desperate to get in on the superhero genre long after that train has left the station. As this year proves, it would have been better if they simply hadn’t tried.