The Crow is cynical cinema at its most forgettable

One of cinema's most rewarding elements is the reminders artistry can flourish under any circumstances. Powerful creativity informs so many movies with threadbare budgets and minimal resources at their disposal. There is no cynicism in these low-budget productions. Just a desire to get specific visuals, ideas, and characters out into the world. Earlier this year, I witnessed a comedy named Fantasy A Gets a Mattress. Made for $3,800, this Seattle-set tale is full of memorably wacky characters, oddball jokes, and creative filmmaking. It’s a deeply inspiring enterprise, a reflection that striking cinema, as Anton Ego, would put it, “can come from anywhere”. While rich filmmakers wax poetic on the "virtues" of A.I. cinema devoid of humanity or aloof shareholders declare theatrical movigoing dead. indie efforts full of vibrant creativity are more important than ever.

Take a peek throughout the indie scene and you’ll see countless modern movies (Hundreds of Beavers, hello!) that vividly expand the boundaries of what movies can look, sound, and feel like. There’s always something scrappy and inventive around the corner ready to remind you why you love cinema. Of course, if you watch enough motion pictures, you’re bound to get the inverse of Tangerine or D.E.B.S. A dreary motion picture molded through a cynical prism with too much money to burn. Enter 2024’s The Crow, the latest Rupert Sanders directorial effort. An adaptation of James O'Barr's comics of the same name (previously adapted into a 1994 Brandon Lee feature), The Crow has money to spare (a $50 million budget) but no imagination to speak of.

Zach Baylin and William Schneider's The Crow script begins with a young Eric experiencing death for the first time when his favorite CGI horse perishes. Cut to...young lady Shelly (FKA Twigs) being informed by her friend Zadie (Isabella Wei) that she possesses an incriminating video of a crime lord, Satan's minion, and their former boss Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston). It is deeply amusing that apparently, a single video would "take down" a guy with Satanic powers at his disposal. Wielding this video has put Shelly and her comrades on the radar of Roeg's violent minions, including Marian (Laura Birn). To evade those people, Shelly gets into a rehab clinic that a now grown-up Eric (Bill Skarsgard) also resides in

Here, a romance blossoms between the two tormented souls. They later escape the rehab clinic and have a few days as a happy couple. The good times stop once Roeg’s henchmen murder the duo. In the afterlife, the spirit Kronos (Sami Bouajila) gives Eric a mission. He must return to the land of the living as a super-powered being. Then he can take out the men who killed him and Shelly. Alas, once he returns to the mortal realm as a drastically different being, he does not bellow out "I'M DIFFERENT!" like a true Crow. Now unable to die, Eric becomes “The Crow” in pursuit of love-fueled vengeance and the slim possibility that he can bring Shelly back from the dead. Lots of bloody violence ensues.

Previously, director Rupert Sanders evaporated the fantastical out of Snow White with Snow White & The Huntsman and removed Ghost in the Shell’s most fantastical visual flourishes with its American live-action remake. Continuing this creative motif, Sanders lends The Crow a dazed, aloof visual aesthetic devoid of any commitment. All the moody colors and brooding suggest this new Crow aims to reduce 2000s edgelords and Hot Topic geeks alike into the Rick Dalton pointing meme. So why is his approach to all the angst so generic and riddled with half-measures?

Sanders and the screenplay exude way too much self-consciousness to live up to the aesthetic they’re aiming for. Classic emo material like My Chemical Romance songs boasted about how “I’m gonna show my scars!”. Fall Out Boy ditties had track titles cheekily chastising authority like "Our Lawyer Made Us Change the Name of This Song So We Wouldn't Get Sued". Emo and punk scenes are infused with self-confidence. The Crow lacks that quality. Everything is so timed in this R-rated movie that the script won't even commit to specific names for its afterlife destinations. The theological framework of The Crow is as ill-defined as its characters. Worse, the sloppy screenplay suffocates moviegoers with expository dialogue and pointless explanations for its titular character’s lore.

A microcosm of this problem comes when Eric finally dons the classic Crow makeup for the finale. However, his eye and lip colors aren’t from his girlfriend’s makeup kit like in the 1994 film. Now, these facets of his face come from some of his dead friend’s fountain of tattoo ink. Dipping his finger into this substance, Eric smears his eyes and dabs his lips with this material. It’s a ludicrously drawn-out sequence that hits all the wrong notes on multiple fronts, including how it feels like a way to reassure insecure audience members that there’s nothing “gay” about Eric. Also, this sequence has The Crow epitomizing the frustrating trend of superhero characters not putting on their extravagant outfits until the last 20-ish minutes of a movie. A truly punk/emo motion picture would not adhere to convention so rigidly!

Everything in The Crow is either too convoluted or boringly derivative of other movies. This includes Eric’s gruesome climactic swordfight against baddies set to classical music. Most tedious is the stilted attempts at fleshing out Eric and Shelly’s relationship before her death. Sanders and the script seem incredibly uncomfortable handling this intimate material. Filmmakers like Nicole Holofcener or director JT Mollner exude confidence in capturing people exchanging romantic dialogue. They’re enraptured by connections blossoming between two souls and that proves infectious to the audience.

The Crow, meanwhile, reduces Eric and Shelly’s budding romance to a terrible knock-knock joke and a couple of montages suggesting love between the pair. Once she's passed on, Shelley's few on-screen appearecnes harken back to this excellent Caitlin Reilly video. Their backstories and personalities are kept so generic that it’s impossible to tell what they see in each other. They’re just two conventionally attractive people who keep saying phrases about “true love” ripped from angsty 2011 Tumblr posts. Once he’s on his own as a super-powered crusader, Skarsgard struggles mightily to exude a distinctive personality the audience can latch onto. This actor’s proven talented elsewhere because he goes wild with outlandish choices. Chaining him down to a deeply forgettable anti-hero makes this casting deeply confusing.

Everything in this movie is too much of a gloomy buttoned-up slog to deliver even amusingly bad material like Madame Web’s now “iconic” line “but I don't have a neuromuscular disorder”. If you’re trapped in a theater with this boondoggle, you'll find yourself tapping your foot waiting for the credits to roll. Perhaps you’ll get some unintentional chuckles out of how every set looks lifted from a typical CW show. The afterlife where Kronos gives important information to Eric is just a run-down train station in need of some mowing. Generic empty warehouses and cramped apartments are the norm for interior environments. If you’re lucky like me, you few brave souls seeing The Crow theatrically might even get to see the now-pulled Megalopolis trailer with the fake critic quotes on the big screen. Boy, that was a surreal sight! Lionsgate must’ve forgotten to pull the trailer from theaters as well as from the internet.

If I’m talking about “coming attractions” trivia, then clearly The Crow has nothing substantive or interesting to offer audiences. Isn’t that nuts to say? This is a movie that’s been in development for 16 years and cost $50 million to make, more than four times the budget of If Beale Street Could Talk. All that effort and money down the drain for a motion picture that doesn’t even have a sliver of the creativity of a $3,800 endeavor like Fantasy A Gets a Mattress. Film fans don’t have to look far for reminders of this medium's infinite creative possibilities. There are always people out there scraping up pennies to something new and enthralling in this artform. Absorb motion pictures like A Town Called Panic or Mandy for those reminders and skip The Crow.