AUGUST 22, 2024
GENRE: REVENGE, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)
Sometimes a movie tells you instantly that it's going to be a mess, and unfortunately Rupert Sanders' The Crow is one such film. Because after the usual laughable number of production companies at the top of the film, we are then treated to something like 25 executive producer credits - BEFORE the cast or "A Rupert Sanders film" or anything like that! I have never seen anything like it (and as someone who makes credits for a living, I tend to notice these things, so you can take my word here) and it told me right from the start that this is a movie that's been studio note'd and "what if we also do this?" until any semblance of a soul it once had was completely washed away.
At least it otherwise starts off OK. We don't know specifically what put Eric (Bill Skarsgård) into a fancy rehab center in the middle of the woods, but we know that he's a quiet, troubled loner type in a facility that forbids fraternizing between the female and male patients. So naturally, when the equally broken Shelly (FKA twigs) arrives, we know they're going to disregard this rule (not that it matters, no one on staff ever intervenes) and find in each other the love they've been denied throughout their shattered lives. So, you know, OK! Their chemistry isn't all that great, but on paper I buy it, and you want things to work out for them.
Of course there wouldn't be much of a movie if it did. Shelly got sent to this facility after being caught with drugs while trying to escape some people who were trying to kill her, and it isn't long before they catch up to her and murder her and Eric (via suffocation, which is always a brutal thing to watch). But then Eric wakes back up, not dead, and with seemingly immortal powers for good measure. A mysterious man named Kronos explains some of this to Eric and sends him back to the overworld, where he can track down the men who murdered him and his love to set their souls at rest. But unfortunately for the movie, we already know why they were killed and who did it, so there's no sense of intrigue to his journey. Before we even meet Eric, we meet Shelly and also her friend, who are in possession of an incriminating video of wealthy socialite named Roeg (Danny Huston, in a role he could play in his sleep by now). So our hero is a few steps behind us for a while, which is never a great method of hooking in an audience.
Weirder, Eric isn't even the first character to have supernatural powers. When we meet Roeg, he explains that he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for immortality, with the deal being he has to send fresh innocent souls down to Hell (he notes that rapists and murderers won't do; it's the closest the movie gets to giving him any dimension as a character). He then demonstrates this power: he whispers some sort of (not English) curse in their ear, at which point they commit a graphic suicide. An appropriately terrible villain move! Alas, he only uses it one other time in the nearly two hour film, which otherwise seems to forget he has immortality at all and just comes off as yet another all-powerful rich asshole.
But at least that's SOMETHING, as the other villains don't even get that much. There's a blonde lady, a guy with a scarred eye, an RFK Jr. looking guy (blonde lady's husband, I think?), and a dirty cop who is the first to go, even though there's some potential there. Oh and then a whole bunch of security guards, who I guess we have to believe are all evil and not just a bunch of dudes doing their job, because Eric wipes all of them out with a sword in the movie's centerpiece action scene, mowing through them at an opera house in what seems like a parody of the John Wick series, because (again: he's immortal) he gets shot dozens of times but barely reacts. There are some fine gore gags in these and the film's other two (very brief) action blowouts—I particularly liked when Eric is impaled through the back with a sword and then pushes the point of said sword into a guy's face—but Sanders never finds much rhythm in these scenes. A cool moment or visual here and there, sure, but nothing that ever gets the pulse racing. Worse, during that opera house lobby massacre, he occasionally cuts back to the ongoing performance, and here and there Eric's ballet-esque violent acts mirror the moves of the performers, but it happens so intermittently that it seems like something coincidental the editor noticed as opposed to a fully designed back and forth mirror sequence.
And I'm not exaggerating about the movie's curious low energy. I was fine with it at first, because we are meeting our heroes and watching them fall in love (albeit quickly, more soon), but even once Eric dies and is reborn for vengeance, not a lot of exciting stuff happens for a while, and when it does happen it tends to be brief. If the reported budget is accurate, this movie costs more than John Wick 2, which delivered nearly nonstop thrills (and a more famous cast), so along with the Bulgaria shooting location—a go-to location for a movie looking to get more bang for their buck—I have to wonder where that money went, because it sure as hell wasn't on big thrills. Perhaps that $50m it reportedly cost includes all the years of development? This has gone through a number of incarnations over the years, with actors like Bradley Cooper and Jason Momoa starring as well as directors like Stephen Norrington and Corin Hardy (this also probably accounts for why so many people are listed as executive producers); if the movie succeeds at anything, it's evidence of unbreakable persistence on the producers' part to see this thing through despite all the setbacks.
Some of those earlier versions sounded promising (or at least, baffling enough to draw my attention. Bradley Cooper???) but there's certainly nothing wrong with Skarsgård as an actor. Unfortunately he's let down by a script (or at least, the editing of said script in post production) that leaves far too many things unexplained. How long are he and Shelly together before they're murdered? It's unclear; it seems it's only been a few days but later flashbacks inform us they've seemingly been together for much longer. And if that's the case, what took Roeg so long to find them? They're in the same (nameless) city and not hiding at all. Similarly, at a certain point they have a group of friends, but where did they come from? Were they friends of one or both of them before they went to rehab? Given Shelly's backstory, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense for her to hook up with her old crew (i.e. people who could tell Roeg and his minions where she is in exchange for some money and/or a fix), but their whole thing was that they felt abandoned by the world at large. So again: who are these people? Eric seems to have a close bond with a tattoo guy, but when (spoiler) the dude is executed by the villains, Eric just sits next to his corpse in a playful manner as if he was another villain, and certainly not a person he cared about (not to mention that it's basically his fault the guy is dead). It's fine to focus on the character work and love story over action, but when all that stuff is leaving the audience underwhelmed and even confused, it's not exactly the best tradeoff. Better to be drowned out with noise, especially when the villain himself is superpowered and yet does nothing with it.
So alas. All this time spent trying to make this movie (Norrington's version was announced in 2008!) and this wet fart is what they ended up with. There's a handful of nice visuals (absolutely loved the super wide shot of Eric trying to swim down to Shelly's corpse after the villains tossed them in the water) and some amusing touches with the immortality, like Eric snapping his broken leg back into place after being run over by a car during a chase. And around the end of act 2 (spoiler here) there's an interesting idea involving his immortal powers and how he can lose them, but instead of turning it into a sort of crisis of faith that drives the rest of the movie and his actions within it, he basically just shrugs it off and the movie proceeds toward an ending that is, at best, idiotic (and inches into the sort of ending that no genre fan ever wants to see, though I can't be more specific without spelling it out). And that's the movie in a nutshell, really: 110 minutes of uninteresting or downright bad ideas, peppered with occasional moments of inspiration that suggest at some point this might have been at least a decent timekiller.
What say you?
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