Review: ‘The Crow’ does everything wrong, even the things it does right

In an interview with Esquire, Bill Skarsgård says the 2024 rendition of The Crow is not a remake of the Brandon Lee-led 1994 film, but a brand new adaptation of James O’Barr’s famed comic book series.

That’s an important distinction, since The Crow being chiefly interested in the source material is very different from trying to modernize the much-lauded 1994 film. But, then again, it’s not an important distinction at all, because this movie sucks either way.

It would have been bad enough if The Crow simply went through the motions – asinine plotting, milquetoast characterization, a flat Skarsgård – and called it a day, but it doubles down on its dramatic and narrative mediocrity by showing off what it’s capable of bringing to this IP, and then going out of its way to withhold those things from us.

It’s a foul, foul attempt from a studio to franchise an IP that they’re clueless about, and it just might earn Zach Baylin (who co-wrote the film with William Schneider) a Razzie nomination to go with his Oscar nomination for his King Richard screenplay.

The Crow stars Skarsgård as Eric Draven, a patient at an institution for troubled youth who draws and writes dark and disturbing images and words. He meets Shelly (FKA Twigs), a musician who fell in with a bad crowd and is currently being hunted by Vincent Roeg (portrayed by an unremarkable Danny Huston), a crime lord who’s possessed by the devil.

Eric and Shelly run away together and fall in love, but when Shelly’s past catches up to her and winds up getting both her and Eric killed, Eric is brought back to life as The Crow, an immortal vigilante tasked with righting the wrongs inflicted upon him and Shelly. Armed with an unquenchable bloodlust and an even greater love for his fallen life partner, Eric sets off to put their murderers in the ground.

It would be far too easy to root all of this criticism for The Crow in the fact that this movie didn’t need to exist, since the 1994 film is more-or-less uneclipsable as a Crow adaptation. That being said, who’s to say that there could never have been a world where someone came up with another fantastic interpretation of O’Barr’s comic book, and turned it into a great movie?

A hypothetical ideal adaptation of The Crow wouldn’t have butchered the character of Eric Draven this badly. The protagonist doesn’t have an arc – at no point can we get a read on Eric’s emotional journey, because there is no journey. Instead, he just reacts to everything in a way that makes it more convenient for the next assembly line-coded plot beat to manifest. One might characterize Eric as a personified surplus of jarring tonal shifts, but there’s not even any tonal starting point from which to shift from.

Furthermore, Skarsgård is uncharacteristically hard to watch here. It might be the case that his dialogue was impossible to sell (a fate he shares with his castmates), but there’s an anticharisma that radiates off him at all times, as though he’s the conduit for all the joylessness native to this entire production. His performance is a blip on the radar in comparison to the rest of the film’s failings, however, and the world is bound to forget all about this once he rolls up as Count Orlok in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu.

Perhaps the greatest of these aforementioned failings is all the dead weight it shoves into our face in place of any actual story. The Crow spends far too much time unsuccessfully trying to sell us on the idea that Eric and Shelly love each other, which is a problem that arises by giving us an origin story for Eric and Shelly’s relationship.

In other The Crow stories, the fact of Eric and Shelly’s inseparability is established from the get-go. This has always been a foundational building block for the character, but The Crow rips that away and spends way too much time catching us up on the nuances of Eric’s motive, and the emotion it’s trying to instill doesn’t even land. For further context, a Batman film where most of the runtime is spent on the night that Thomas and Martha Wayne got shot so that we understand just how traumatized Bruce is, would face a similar problem.

Is it possible to create a great narrative even with this relationship origin story? Maybe, yes, but the fact remains that if you remove elements from a character that were key to making their stories work in the past, you need to replace it with something else. The Crow doesn’t do that.

But here’s the thing: it could have. The film emphasizes that Eric can’t die so long as his love stays pure, but he’s still capable of feeling pain. Why not rejigger the magic system a bit and make it so that Eric can never die, but he only feels pain if his love remains pure? That opens the door for a theme revolving around the psychology of revenge, and makes for a fascinating tension for Eric to grapple with as a character; the scope of his invulnerability would become inversely connected to the motive that allows us audiences to cheer for him.

In other words, if he got to a point where he could no longer feel pain, that would be bad news for both Eric and his enemies, and the stakes could then be scrambled in an interesting way. Why not try something like that instead of using Eric’s immortality logistics as a throwaway line that does nothing but build a world that has no story in it for us to be interested in?

The what-could-have-been sins don’t end there, either. The Crow bafflingly spends most of its runtime focusing on Eric’s brooding and uneventfully piecing together the locations of his targets, all while Vincent churns out some useless dramatic tension elsewhere. In other words, The Crow does way less killing than one would expect, and that’s a shame, because when Eric finally gets around to really unleashing his gory mayhem upon Vincent’s goons, there’s a hearty handful of genuinely great kills involved. The Crow‘s murder choreography is the one thing it has going for it, and it could not have been utilized less. Again, it wouldn’t be necessarily impossible to make a more cerebral, contemplative Crow story, but you actually have to bring something to the table to make up for the absence of a tried-and-true staple for this character. And The Crow, again, doesn’t do that.

In closing, some might say that The Crow squanders the integrity of the 1994 film, but they would be wise not to dignify The Crow with such a statement. Brandon Lee’s swansong is one of the great miracles of cinema. Despite the actor’s tragic demise on set, his collaborators pulled it together and managed to birth a darkly gorgeous comic book film that remains one of the very best of the genre to this day (due largely in part to Lee’s performance, no less).

The fact that it happens to share a title with this abysmal excuse for an adaptation is nothing but trivia, and The Crow will no doubt go down in history as one of the very worst of the comic book adaptations, assuming history remembers it at all.