The Crow 2024 review: Limp, exhuasting remake has no reason to exist

If the 1994 adaptation of The Crow was a supercharged Meatloaf music video, then the 2024 version is a film student’s approximation of an Evanescence clip.

Many questioned why anyone would remake The Crow — among them, the original film’s Australian director Alex Proyas — but it was inevitable. Anything that has a baked-in audience is fair game in our franchise-heavy era but for 30 years The Crow was sacrilegious.

Its lead star Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee, died during production when a prop gun misfired and the actor was hit in the abdomen with live ammunition. Lee’s death at 28-years-old lent The Crow an added layer of emotional significance.

That 1994 film was followed by three inconsequential sequels centred on other stories but no one had dared to touch the character of Eric Draven. Until now.

The filmmakers of the 2024 version had deliberately avoided a straight remake of Proyas’ film, citing a desire to not do a “disservice” to the 1994 movie. But they really could’ve taken more notes from Proyas’ over-the-top symphony to camp.

Where the earlier film was operatic in its delightful unhingedness, the remake cheats by staging its most violent scene during the performance of an opera. This is a movie that is show and tell, as if it’s made the infuriating assumption the audience won’t “get” it unless everything is spelled out.

To be fair, there’s a lot more to get. The original was a straightforward story of a young man resurrected with supernatural powers to seek vengeance against the criminal gang who killed him and his girlfriend, spurred by the great eternity of their love.

This new version overcomplicates it by introducing Vincent (Danny Huston), a villainous rich guy who struck a deal with the devil for eternal life by sending young souls to hell. He does this with creepy whispering and some kind of blood exchange ritual. It’s very messy.

This time, we also get the backstory of Eric (Bill Skarsgard) and Shelly (FKA Twigs), of how they meet wearing drunk-tank pink trackies at a rehab facility and fall in love over a matter of days.

The doomed lovers are killed by Vincent’s goons, including the ice-cold Marian (Laura Birn). As a side note, Eric and Shelly could’ve avoided death if they hadn’t done something as stupid as “hide out” in his apartment despite it being one of the first places the goons would’ve looked given they knew she had fled rehab with him.

He comes back immediately, not a year later, and rains chaos and violence down on Vincent and his henchmen. It’s bloody, it’s bone-cracking and it’s bam-bam and stabby-stabby. It feels both too extravagant to the point of desensitisation and not extravagant enough in that it has no impact. Those scenes feel rote. There’s nothing surprising about it.

Lots of movies are “bad” but still interesting but earnest-to-a-fault The Crow is not that. It’s limp, exhausting and gives you no reason at all to care about Eric and Shelly or this battle between love and hate.

Rating: 2/5

The Crow is in cinemas from August 29