We’ve been telling you for decades that wanting to reboot or remake The Crow is a risky project. Alex Proyas has been hammering it home forever, fans like me chant it on social media too, The Crow doesn’t need a modernized version, because the 1994 film is sufficient in itself. It is timeless, eternal, it is anchored in its time, the one where many things were tried, where risks were taken, The Crow is a cult film, by the presence of Brandon Lee, his performance too, Eric Draven, it’s him and no one else, he is magnetic in it. And then his death on the set also contributes to this status of cult film, untouchable. But as everyone knows, Hollywood does not know how to be satisfied with its past, it needs to stir it up, to dig it up and what had to happen happened. The Crow version 2024 is a reality, its artistic and probably commercial failure too and it’s not for lack of warning eh…
It must also be said that the exercise was perilous. Coming after The Crow by Brandon Lee and Alex Proyas, you have to be either really burned out or completely cracked to embark on such a project. However, after decades of trying, Hollywood has finally managed to gather the money and the artists to carry out this desire to resurrect this license, and you will see in a way that is completely out of its depth. And yet, when you look at the film’s credits, you could hope for a little hope. Edward R Pressman as producer, RIP by the way since he left us last year, and it was he himself who launched The Crow in 1994 and who gave Alex Proyas his chance to make movies, he who had limited himself to music videos until now. We also have the name of Samuel Hadida that we can see in the credits, he also left us, but in 2018. And then, the choice of Bill Skarsgård, who played Pennywise in the horror film “It” and who we could see in the role of the Marquis de Gramont in John Wick 4. A much more interesting choice than that of Jason Momoa involved for a time in the project to succeed Brandon Lee. It was in 2018 if my memory serves me right.
Doomed to fail?
The director is Rupert Sanders, who hasn’t done anything since his Ghost in the Shell with Scarlett Johansson, another project that was a pain to adapt and that was half-faulty. Only half-faulty, because there were some cool things in it. But despite this team, despite the desire to do something other than a stupid and nasty remake, and it’s all to their credit, this version of The Crow 2024 is a failure. A failure because the guys failed to understand the very essence of James O’Barr’s work. Yes, The Crow is a revenge movie with a guy who comes back from the dead to massacre the people who raped and killed the woman he was supposed to marry, but it’s much more than that. It’s an intimate work above all, with this theme of impossible mourning that this remake totally deconstructs.
Because in this 2024 version, the writers may have decided to keep the characters of Eric Draven and Shelly Webster, but their treatment has been completely rewritten and that is their main mistake. With so many differences from the original characters, I think it would have been wiser to start with different protagonists and not touch the aura that Eric and Shelly give off, a bit like it was the case with the countless sequels and TV series that were all systematic failures. By touching Eric Draven and Shelly Webster, we touch the sacred, we touch the original work of James O’Barr and above all we trample on the memory of Brandon Lee, and that is what is most delicate and most risky.
This is all the more regrettable since the comic echoes the personal story that James O’Barr himself experienced, since he lost his girlfriend after she was knocked down by a drunk driver. Alex Proyas went even further in his film version, by adding additional scenes between Eric Draven and Shelly Webster to support this powerful love between the two lovers who were about to get married and who will be badly butchered. Here, their death is watered down, they are suffocated in plastic bags, no more, no less. The scene is rather successful, but the impact on the story and the characters is much less striking. What justified Eric Draven’s violent and cruel acts when he comes back from the dead is precisely the violent and shocking murder of himself and especially of Shelly, raped before his eyes. In the remake, everything is forced, especially the relationship between Eric and Shelly that we don’t believe for a single second. They meet in a rehab center, fall in love and do nothing but make love for the first 20 minutes of the film. The relationship between the two characters being artificial on paper, Rupert Sanders felt obliged to support their love affair on screen. Literally, the first 20 minutes linger on their poorly written relationships, summed up in love to love scenes with a vulgarity that describes well the time we live in, but which is totally disconnected from the characters that James O’barr imagined. It’s not far from a post-teen treatment like Twilight, it’s so embarrassing, especially since FKA Twigs delivers a rather ordinary performance as Shelly Webster. The character becomes almost unpleasant at certain moments that we don’t care at all if she gets killed later.
A REMAKE YES, BUT DIFFERENT
Where the remake takes risks, and we can only applaud them for trying, is in wanting to anchor this version in our time, the 2020s, to the point of offering an emo-fragile version of Eric Draven, who seems to have come straight out of Ninja Theory’s Devil May Cry to which we have added all the bad taste tattoos of Jared Leto’s Joker, mullet and sword earring to boot. It was already in bad taste in the trailers, it is even more so in the full film and it makes you wonder if the people who approved Eric Draven’s look have never heard of the backlash suffered by Jared Leto’s Joker. So yes, there is a small reference to The Crow from 1994 in this hideous look via the “Lullaby” tattoo that can be seen on Eric Draven’s eyebrow, and which is none other than the title of a song by The Cure, a band inseparable from the soundtrack of Alex Proyas’ film. Moreover, musically, The Crow from 2024 also misses the mark, with an anecdotal soundtrack that never manages to iconize these scenes as Proyas had managed to do at the time. After that, it must be said that the latter comes from the music video, and that he has worked with artists like INXS, Yes and Sting. Obviously, that helps.
So yes, in the 2024 version of The Crow, Rupert Sanders never tries to copy Proyas’ film, he even tries to move away from it, but once again, everything is done with an almost total irrelevance. Proyas’ music video aesthetic is replaced by an artistic direction that is certainly dark, but which singularly lacks character. Apart from a rather cool opening sequence, a few nice shots and visuals and the massacre sequence in the opera that we can see in the trailers, Rupert Sanders offers a classic staging, in line with the current Hollywood production. Clearly, the direction lacks madness, risk-taking and it’s a shame because The Crow is clearly a film that could have allowed its director to add his touch of madness. This touch of madness, if we want to see it this way, is to have dared to integrate a real big bad guy with powers into this remake. There has always been this fantastic dimension in The Crow, carried by the invincibility granted by the crow, but here, we move to another dimension. A businessman, Vincent Roeg, would have made a pact with the devil and would be capable of having found the magic formula for eternal life. All he has to do is take the lives of innocent young people. It is the actor Danny Hutson who embodies him, an eternal second-rate actor whose face is familiar to us but whose name systematically escapes us. His performance is as caricatured as the writing of his character, and good god we would have liked not to see such freedom in the writing. It is a failure, brings nothing to the story and completely off topic with the themes carried by James O’Barr.
BIRD OF MISFORTUNE
And what about the choice of assigning an unprecedented and additional mission to Eric Draven, who learns through a new character, Kronos, played by the Frenchman Sami Bouajila, who tells him that it is possible to resurrect Shelly. And that’s where all the interest of the film falls apart. What made Draven’s vengeful mission beautiful was knowing that his return was one-way, that there was no possible return, and that this return to the world of the living was ephemeral. There, in the film, Eric Draven never stops traveling between the world of the dead, or at least its airlock, and that of the living with a transformation that is also caricatured, treated almost like a superhero film. What a disaster…
As you can see, there is not much to save from this remake of The Crow, except for an attempt not to copy Alex Proyas’ film with Brandon Lee. The problem is that by moving so far away from the original material, there is no longer any connection with James O’Barr’s work. The characters are rewritten, almost dragged through the mud, the atmosphere of the film is soulless, the staging is ordinary and proves once again that surfing on the nostalgia of the great films of yesteryear is not enough. As quickly seen as quickly forgotten. NEXT!
OUR RATING: 3.5/10
