It could be argued the very act of making The Crow in 2024 is in poor taste. Initially The Crow was a comic book series published by James O’Barr starting in the late 1980s that was successful enough to spawn a movie adaptation in 1994. That movie has become a cult classic, but a not insubstantial reason for that is due to its infamy regarding the tragedy of the on-set death of lead actor Brandon Lee. It is one of the highest profile fatal accidents to happen on a movie set, and The Crow has long been culturally associated with that, deservedly or not. And so to bring that property back thirty years later at a time where its cultural relevance outside of that fact is minimal, strikes one as rather ghastly. And that’s before touching on the movie’s themes and content.
The Crow is and always has been a deeply goth series -by which I mean it played very intensely to a Gen-X goth subculture, in its aesthetics, its use of violence, and its particular kind of melodrama. And director Rupert Sanders tries to tap into that sensibility and perhaps adapt it for an equivalent Gen-Z demographic, whether such a thing even exists. But whether or not the teen goths are there, the movie clearly has a hard time both finding its audience and determining where it fits in the modern comic book movie landscape.
Certainly this remake retains its classic goth character, and cannot be said to be watered down much in that regard. A perfectly cast Bill Skarsgård plays Eric, a quiet traumatized young man at an institutional rehab clinic who falls for and eventually escapes with his fellow inmate Shelly (FKA Twigs), and they enjoy a peaceful all-consuming romance together in a nameless big city until figures from Shelly’s criminal past come to kill them. From a kind of purgatory, Eric is given the power through his love for Shelly to go back in an immortal body and take revenge on those who killed them, including a kingpin called Roeg (Danny Huston) with some devilish powers of his own.
Sanders is a stylistically curious, compositionally cognizant director, though to a similar sense of vacant meaning you see in someone like Zack Snyder. Both his previous two movies, Snow White and the Huntsman and the live-action Ghost in the Shell demonstrated his capacity for strong visuals but with somewhat feeble consideration. He has a particular look he aims to convey and realizes it, but there isn't much to glean from it other than its sense of cool. And this is a key reason why, though The Crow looks and moves better than most of its studio blockbuster contemporaries, it often feels no less shallow.
Yet they are indeed sharp aesthetics and match very well the grandiosity so much of the story is presented with. Sanders adopts that very critical goth outlook of hyperbole. Every stake and emotion is turned up to eleven -the overwrought depths of love give way to the depths of darkness -everything is played to its peak; and this attitude carries over to the violence as well, which when it kicks into gear can be very gnarly as Eric sustains and painfully heals from gruesome injuries that he in turn inflicts on others. He is run over by a truck, he makes a bloodbath of a friends' apartment, and the boiling point comes in an extensive sequence at the opera, the extravagant music soaring around (and talking of broad opulence) where he dispatches with a couple dozen henchmen to tremendous excess with a katana.
This cornucopia somewhat walks a tightrope of silly and disturbing, as the movie itself struggles to make a case for itself as anything serious. In some places, Sanders leans into the extremities with an attitude bordering on amusement; elsewhere he clearly strives to find some genuine hook in the ocean of emo nihilism but it eludes him. Outside of his torments, Eric is not a very compelling protagonist, and though Skarsgård matches the mood and aesthetics impeccably well, he can't summon what isn't available to him in the script. The character is archetypal in a mythic sense, designed to be akin to some classical tragic hero -evoked quite plainly in the underworld he keeps finding himself in where he is obliged to appeal his fate to higher powers- but there is a disconnect felt between the tangible and spiritual. We're told of how much he loses his soul Dorian Gray-style in submitting to his vengeance, and later a permanent bargain to take Shelly's place in Hell. And it's good gothic drama. But Skarsgård plays Eric from the beginning with the shadow of the Crow lying in wait. He just needs an excuse for a brooding temperament and addiction to violence. Happy Eric just doesn't much resonate.
I suppose the performance of Twigs as his romantic partner contributes to that. In spite of Shelly's supposedly impulsive character, she's played very subdued and a little lethargic. And there's only so far that that can be justified as an element of the goth mood. It's hard to believe the mountain of affection she could inspire in Eric. And obviously, Twigs is let down additionally by her primary function being as a fridged narrative device for Eric, regardless of how much the script attempts to deepen her backstory post-mortem. The rest of the cast doesn't particularly matter, but it should be noted Sami Bouajila summons some pretty good gravitas as the Purgatory guardian and spiritual guide Kronos, and Huston understands the cornball nature of his assignment and chews his scenery with an appropriate if not especially striking panache.
The movie builds intensely to their confrontation, in a manner like a John Wick film (Skarsgård on the other side of it this time). But in spite of the flourishes of violence and style that bring it about, it is underwhelming. More brazenly digital effects take precedent and the catharsis of revenge doesn't resonate -which in this story it is very much meant to. And I think a reason for that is a numbing effect of the movie. It's not just the violence, but the totality of it with Sanders's style and the music and general mood of a kind of shallow darkness -it gets exhausting by the end.
The Crow is not so soulless as I feared, but nor is it very engaging or inspired. Sanders is attracted to the aesthetics and heightened gothic tone; and in focusing on these makes a movie that doesn't look or feel like everything else. But it is still empty as it grasps for a sense of relevance and purpose beyond its mere veneer -and ultimately provides no convincing argument for coming back from the dead.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch
Comments
Post a Comment