A nauseatingly bad reboot of one of the great miracles of comic book adaptations seeks vengeance on streaming

The last few years of the MCU has torpedoed this sentiment into near-oblivion, but even before then, you’d be hard-pressed to make the case that comic book movies could claw at the ranks of prestige cinema. Oldboy and the Spider-Verse films certainly accomplished this, but those genuine high-ball shots remain few and far between.

It’s perhaps 1994’s The Crow that holds the crown of comic book cinema all these years later, not just because of its robust action and powerful themes, but of the generational greatness of the late Brandon Lee, who tragically passed on set, in the lead role. This, of course, made the loathsome 2024 reboot sting even more than it would have from just being an awful movie — a moniker that the Starz subscribers are rapidly becoming aware of.

Per FlixPatrol, the 2024 reboot of The Crow is currently the most-watched film on the Starz movie charts in the United States at the time of writing, edging out the likes of Cocaine Bear (third place), John Wick: Chapter 4 (eighth place), and fellow cinematic stinker Borderlands (ninth place).

The film stars an uncharacteristically uncharismatic Bill Skarsgård as Eric Draven and FKA Twigs as Shelley Webster, who cross paths in a rehabilitation center and fall hopelessly in love. But when Shelley and Eric are murdered by the devil-haunted crime lord Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), Eric is suddenly revived as the Crow, a vengeful spirit that can’t be killed. With Shelley’s murderers in his crosshairs, he sets out on a path of retribution.

In a sentence, this film takes everything that made the original so rightfully revered, and goes out of its way to leave a series of uninspired mounds of dirt in its place. Even the action sequences — which could have at least qualified it for a garbage popcorn movie badge — are sidelined for the sake of cynical, poorly-acted meandering and world-building that no one cares about.

All of this, on top of the fact that Brandon Lee’s Eric Draven was uneclipsable, to say nothing of how remarkable it was that director Alex Proyas managed to preserve Lee’s performance in the final cut of the film even though the actor died while filming. In doing so, he masterfully contextualized Eric’s grief-stricken agony in a swift opening sequence that the sequel amateurishly tried to sell with several Eric-Shelley montages. In other words, the 2024 film didn’t trust us enough to believe that Eric and Shelley loved each other, and spent 30 unsuccessful minutes trying to convince us of that.

Moreover, Skarsgård’s Eric Draven is broody and full of sneers, which runs counter to everything that made the 1994 film’s story so powerful. Brandon Lee’s Eric is transgressively violent and rather dark, but it’s a darkness born of countercultural love, whereas the darkness of his enemies is born of manipulative evil. Lee’s Eric protects children and helps addicts. Skarsgård’s Eric feels sorry for himself and… not much else.

The original film’s mission statement, then, is to differentiate between actual darkness that compassionate outcasts traffic in, and performative darkness that the poorly-adjusted use to justify their harms against humanity. The 2024’s film’s mission statement, by contrast, was to make a fast buck and hate its own existence, and it was only successful on one of those fronts.