If I had seen the 1994 Alex Proyas film The Crow, it had to have been many, many years ago and I don’t really remember much about it. I mainly remember hearing the stories about the tragic on-set death of star Brandon Lee, and how that kind of overshadowed the entire production, release and overall remembrance of the movie. It seems an odd choice for a film to remake, and at the end of August 2024, in a sort of dumping ground for the worst cinema has to offer, we have Rupert Sanders’ ill-advised remake of The Crow. And, while not the complete and utter debacle it would appear from the dreadful advertising campaign and the lack of pre-release critic reviews, at its best, it’s just kind of…okay?

Eric (Bill Skarsgård) and Shelly (FKA Twigs) are doomed soulmates, destined to be together but facing every obstacle there is. He has a dark past, and she’s on the run from some shadowy figures. After they are both murdered, Eric finds himself in a kind of purgatory where he is presented with the opportunity to bring Shelly back, if he kills all of the people involved with her demise. This leads him back to Vincent (Danny Huston), a crime boss with supernatural abilities. 

I feel like if The Crow meant a lot to me in my formative years, I might be rather disgusted by this endeavor. All of the baggage attached to this would lead one to wonder why Lionsgate thought this would be a good idea at all. Rupert Sanders, having previously directed similarly nothing films like Snow White and the Huntsman and the god-awful, scandal-plagued live action Ghost in the Shell, is not a filmmaker with a strong artistic voice. And having said all that, The Crow (2024) is better than it should be. But it’s also extremely forgettable and does not make a strong impression in any way. 

Bill Skarsgård is fine here, I guess, and there is an intense physicality to this performance that he fully leans into. He’s covered in tattoos and makeup, and his body becomes more jacked as the film goes on. But he is doing strange accent work here. Sometimes he sounds Swedish, sometimes he sounds like he’s from Brooklyn, and I think I even caught a southern twang in a couple lines. I’m not even fully certain where this film takes place. There’s a European flair to it, but it also looks like a number of American cities, and it’s also raining all the time, so who the hell knows? 

Skarsgård’s chemistry with musician/sometimes actress FKA Twigs is not necessarily the problem. There’s an alluring quality about her screen presence that makes her interesting to watch. But the way this love story is written is so slapdash and so abbreviated, so much that it’s difficult to buy their romance, their deep everlasting love. And if that doesn’t work, this entire film doesn’t work. They have a nice chemistry, a nice banter in the beginning, but there’s something so off about this, because it does not feel believable for a single moment. It calls back to all of the Twilight-era swoony romances of the mid to late oughts, where the great love between our leads is the focal point, and it just feels like these two actors can not stand each other. Oh also, can we please, for crying out loud, stop casting Danny Huston as our villains? It’s too easy and too obvious, and it feels like we’ve been doing this for at least a few decades. Give us some more villain actors, Hollywood, I beg of you!

The pacing here is also really, really bad. For a film that runs just over 100 minutes, The Crow feels endless, and that’s a problem. Sanders wants you to get swept up in this world of always-rainy-unnamed-European(?)-city and this swoony doomed romance, but I never once felt the magic he was clearly going for. There is one good sequence involving a bloodbath at an opera. And this scene, somehow, is almost worth the entire cost of admission – at least a look at the film on streaming. This sequence unfolds with the verve of a movie that is certain you have never seen a sequence like this in an action movie before, even though action sequences at the opera are so done to death, they’re almost a joke at this point. I’m back and forth on whether or not the movie is in on this joke, because if it is, I’m tempted to give it some points it doesn’t otherwise earn.

So overall, I went to see The Crow out of some morbid curiosity and I was kind of surprised to find the film not to be the complete and utter disaster I was expecting. But for the most part it just kind of sits there on the screen, weakly hanging on for dear life. Maybe it needed more style, maybe the romance needed to be more enveloping, maybe it just needed something – anything worthwhile to say. Because the pieces do not add up to anything resembling a movie with any compelling reason to exist.