'The Crow' movie review: Dark, broody but not satisfying

The Crow still

Film: The Crow
Cast: Bill Skarsgård, FKA Twigs, Danny Huston, Laura Birn, Jordan Bolger, Isabella Wei, Sami Bouajila, David Bowles
Director: Rupert Sanders
Rating: 2/5
Runtime: 111 min

This reboot of ‘The Crow,' a tribute to Brandon Lee who tragically passed away during the original film's production, may have noble intent but the content is dissatisfying.

Demons from her dark past brutally murder soulmates Shelly( FKA Twigs) and Eric (Bill Skarsgård). So when Eric gets a chance to come alive again he chooses to save his true love by sacrificing himself. Eric sets out to wreak merciless revenge on their killers by traversing the worlds of the living and the dead.

The first half tries to establish their romance but it's so scatterbrained that you just don't feel it. We get a hint of trauma in Eric's past, while Shelley is using rehab to hide from the 'Satan' pursuing her. The rehab setting gives them the opportunity to express their love for each other and then the villains come into the picture. The couple make a break for it, hide out in a friend's flat, have music-video-like stylishly-filmed sex, and later meet up with friends by a lake. But the idyllic escape doesn't last long. There's not much hint of the mythic or supernatural in the first half, other than Danny Huston as evil incarnate murmuring some mumbo-jumbo into the ears of his victims - which lead them to commit harakiri in the most brutal of ways.

Genre tropes and gratuitous gore upend this wearisome tale of reincarnation and revenge set within a dark and depressing atmosphere.

The original adaptation of James O'Barr's comics - about a man who comes back from the dead to avenge his murdered girlfriend - was one of the early imprints of dark superhero cinema. The original was intended as a launchpad for Brandon Lee, the son of Bruce Lee, aiming to establish him as a new action star. O'Barr purportedly conceived the comic book series first published in 1989, to express grief and rage after his fiancée's death. So the graphic novel and the Alex Proyas' movie adaptation had the bad guys as urban criminals. In this film though, Roeg, the kinky rich businessman with a penchant for young pianists has a satanic connection which lends him wishful powers.

Brandon Lee's performance in the original film adaptation was posthumously eulogised as charismatic but Bill Skarsgård's one in this film feels rather caricatured and without substance. He looks the part but doesn't live it. The heavy-on-pancake- and-style treatment here leaves little room for affect or empathy.

This film doesn't feel iconic or entertaining. It feels more like a cash grab with its stylised rendering and choppy, uneven, abstracted narrative. Director Rupert Sanders' admittedly attempts to reimagine the original graphic novel but it feels rather devoid of imagination. Even the background score that incorporates Joy Division, Enya, some Goth/synth Hits, as well as operatic overtures, doesn't do much to accentuate the overall experience. The time taken by Sanders and screenwriters Zach Baylin and William Schneider to get around to the superheroics, makes that element feel like an afterthought. The linkage with the crow is not well established either. The grimy, dystopian, industrialised set-design is impressive, Steve Annis' camerawork establishes new age revisionist chic but it's all a loss in the final reckoning. This outing fails to stir the senses !