PREMISE
Soulmates Eric and Shelly are brutally murdered. Given a chance to save the love of his life, Eric must sacrifice himself and traverse the worlds of the living and the dead, seeking revenge.
THE GOOD STUFF
BILL SKARSGARD- The one thing that this movie does well is establishing Bill Skarsgard as something referred to as a “cult actor.” The very definition of a cult actor is someone who is often celebrated for going as hard as they can with their offbeat artistic choices. As opposed to a lot of other cult actors, however, he has built a sense of reliability when it comes to horror films, such as IT, BARBARIAN, and the upcoming NOSFERATU) and non-tentpole action films, ATOMIC BLONDE, and top 10 movies of the year so far, BOY KILLS WORLD.
He is as good as he can be, given that there’s not much to this character other than what the trailers portray the character to be. Someday, he will be given a franchise where he can officially establish himself as a tried and true action star. But that is not this day.
THE OPERA HOUSE SCENE- This movie cost 50 million dollars to make. Considering this is an action movie released in the summer, it seems like an astronomically low budget to put something forward. It’s hard not to notice that the vast majority of that budget is spent here on this action sequence. And it delivers. There is glorious R-rated CGI violence here that seems very weird in how good it is. Everything in the film that came before this scene and everything that came after this scene is not entertaining whatsoever. But this is one of the better action sequences of the summer. Seriously.
THE BAD STUFF
THE LOVE STORY- More than anything else, this movie wants to emphasize the love story between the two main leads and spins about half an hour doing just that. The problem is not necessarily the chemistry between FKA twigs and Skarsgard… It’s just that the half-hour feels like a full hour and is glacially slow in establishing its characters. This is a 1 hour and 50-minute movie, and it feels like it’s falsely advertised.
Yes, you know the love story is there and that it has to be told, but at some point, this feels like A STAR IS BORN. Because of this, the main character’s transformation into The Crow takes place much later here than in any other Crow movie. And the movie greatly suffers for it.
DANNY HUSTON- God bless this man. I would really have to do the proper Googles to find an actor this great that is consistently put in s***** movies just like this. This is a villain with all the power in the world, no backstory, and the worst dialogue in this film.
And not even bad dialogue in a cheesy way, just bad dialogue where I was just left shaking my head silently. Keep getting them checks, Danny Huston. I know you didn’t see the dialogue you had to say when accepting this job, and you thought it was on par with your talent.
THE UGLY STUFF
THE SUPERNATURAL ELEMENT- Yes, the central theme of the first movie involved a major supernatural plot device. We all know this by now. In that movie, however, it’s notable that nobody else had supernatural forces besides him. He was one person taking on an army, a central theme of many ’90s revenge films.
This movie’s critical mistake is making it a supernatural story without any world-building. You can’t just add something like a HIERARCHICAL demonic secret society to something like this without explaining why. Unfortunately, this movie leans 100 percent into the undeveloped supernatural stuff the first movie did not have.
THE 3RD ACT- The by-product of janky world-building is having a third act that feels rushed with no feeling of a satisfactory payoff to everything that’s come before. Compared to the Opera House scene, which was immaculately choreographed and well-shot with nicely blended CGI effects, the film’s climactic sequence looks ridiculously incompetent. Not to mention, the storyline wraps itself up very quickly in that ‘hacked to s*** in the editing room‘ kind of way.
**************
I didn’t want this to be a shot-for-shot remake of the first movie. I respect that director Rupert Sanders wanted to create more of a world surrounding the Crow character. However, there needed to be a lot more. A lot more of an explanation to the world you’re building, a lot better dialogue, and a lot more action.
THE CROW “remake” is advertising itself as an action movie, but it is abundantly clear that it does not seem to want to be that. There are about two or three other things that this film really wants to be; this film wants to be all of them at once, and it fails at nearly everything. This really could have been good. So disappointing.
THE CROW is in theaters now
