‘The Crow’ Is an Unfathomably Inept ‘Joker’ Ripoff

In Hollywood as in comics, the dead are always waiting to be resurrected, so it’s natural that The Crow would find new life 30 years after it helped pioneer ’90s goth style and made a legend out of star Brandon Lee, who tragically died during its production.

Like its predecessor, Rupert Sanders’ reboot, which hits theaters August 23, concerns an innocent man who’s murdered alongside his beloved and then revived as an avenging angel of death, compelled to kill his killers. Yet whereas Alex Proyas’ original (based on James O’Barr’s comic book series) forged a distinctively dark, brooding identity of its own, this do-over is a pale shadow of that which came before it, and that’s especially true with regards to its protagonist, a furious punisher who stalks a rainy pseudo-Gotham in a Matrix-y raincoat while covered in tattoos—including on his face—that render him a goofy rip-off of Jared Leto’s awful Suicide Squad Joker.

As with that superhero fiasco’s Clown Prince of Crime, Bill Skarsgård’s Crow is an example of trying too hard; the ink that decorates his body (including “Lullaby” written above his eyebrow and tragedy/comedy masks accompanied by the motto, “Cry Now, Cry Later” on his hands) comes across as a desperate attempt to mark the character as ultra-grim and gloomy.

The Crow is most notable for excessively straining for R-rated credibility at every turn, such that a climactic rampage in an opera house lobby vainly strives for grandeur by crosscutting between the stage performance and the Crow’s mayhem, the latter of which involves gruesome decapitations, beheadings, and other assorted out-of-this-world nastiness perpetrated with guns and a samurai sword. Director Sanders aims to make this over-the-top violence thrilling, but it plays as both sadistic and dull—a losing combination that sums up the entirety of these proceedings.

In this unnamed metropolis, Shelly (FKA Twigs) is forced to go on the run when her friend Zadie (Isabella Wei) sends her a mysterious video that apparently puts them in mortal danger. The content of this clip isn’t revealed until midway through The Crow, and it turns out to be intensely underwhelming, but it nonetheless earns Zadie a spot in Hell—literally—courtesy of Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), a businessman who causes the young woman to kill herself by speaking in her ear in unholy tongues.

Vincent has sold his soul to the devil in exchange for eternal life, and that Faustian bargain is maintained by the procurement of innocent souls for Satan’s underworld. This is a tireless task carried out with the aid of minions led by Marian (Laura Birn), and only broken up by Vincent’s doting on a promising concert pianist that he cares for because, well, um, he does.

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To escape Vincent’s henchmen, Shelly gets herself arrested and thrown into a recovery center that operates like a prison. There, she meets Eric (Skarsgård), an oft-bullied recovering addict who has few friends and fewer things to say.

Love blossoms gradually between the two, and when Marian comes looking for Shelly—aided by Shelly’s mom, who’s sold out her kid for vaguely defined reasons—Eric helps her escape. On the run, the two shack up in an apartment owned by Shelly’s friend, where they have passionate sex, play dress up, and do drugs. Still, even though they’re hiding out from lethal pursuers, the two find time to picnic with unidentified acquaintances at a lake, because as written by Zach Baylin and William Schneider, The Crow is nothing if not sloppily inconsistent.

Sanders’ film works hard to generate sparks between its leads, but they never materialize, meaning that its first third is a futile and action-free slog. Things pick up once Eric and Shelly are slain and the former wakes up in a dour purgatory that resembles a dilapidated train station beneath scaffolding-ish walkways. In this way station, he meets Kronos (Sami Bouajila), who explains that Eric’s love was so great that it couldn’t be carried by crows to the afterlife. Instead, he’s been granted a second chance to return to the land of the living to deliver payback against his killers—and if he succeeds and his amour remains pure, he and Shelly will be born anew.

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This is, theoretically speaking, a pretty sweet deal for Eric, yet there’s no joy to his ensuing slaughter, which begins clumsily and hits a roadblock once he learns the secret of the video that began this entire saga. Thus, a new pact is struck in which Eric gets another try at his vigilante mission by agreeing to take Shelly’s spot in Hades—a twist that feels like the movie is just haphazardly making up its hereafter rules as it goes along. Once Eric has his full Crow powers, the film stops dawdling and gets down to bloody business. Sanders’ set pieces, however, are excessive without being inventive; the best he can muster is a skirmish inside an SUV between Eric and various gun-toting assailants, and it ends too quickly to excite.

The Crow isn’t simply lethargic; it’s occasionally ludicrous as well, courtesy of various clunky plot points, shoddy computer-generated effects, and Skarsgård’s silly “artistic” tats (an eye in his chest, prose about devils on his back). Before his final massacre, Eric uses black make-up to draw lines connecting the corners of his eyes and mouth, and the effect is to create a fake “smile” that’s so doggedly Joker-esque, it’s borderline embarrassing. Skarsgård can do little to compensate for this ridiculousness, and his lack of chemistry with Twigs—who’s no more than a functional screen presence—snuffs out the film’s stabs at doomed romance.

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As befitting a refreshed property, The Crow leaves the door open for further Eric adventures, but it’s merely the last of the film’s numerous unoriginal gestures, which extend to the soundtrack’s scuzzy electronica and the tossed-off flashbacks designed to explicate Eric’s deeply rooted trauma.

Huston does his damndest to breathe some fire into this dreary misfire as an upper-crust villain corrupted by his desire to live forever. Ultimately, though, he’s powerless to offset the shopworn aesthetics and second-rate posturing of this do-over, whose sole saving grace—climax be damned—is being inept enough to thwart any real possibility of future sequels.

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