The Crow

The Crow Movie Review Rating:

Star Cast: Bill Skarsgård, FKA Twigs, and Danny Huston.

Director: Rupert Sanders

What’s Good: Sanders manages to create a solid action sequence towards the end, but this is the only real display of action throughout the film.

What’s Bad: Bill Skarsgård and FKA Twigs try to sell their relationship as much as they can, but they fail completely.

Loo Break: Nothing really happens during the first and second act, so there is your chance.

Watch or Not?: No, don’t watch this film, go watch the original film or read the comic if you want know more about The Crow

Language: English (with subtitles).

Available On: Theaters

Runtime: 111 Minutes.

User Rating:

Opening:

30 years ago The Crow, a film based on the comic book written by James O’Barr was released, and with it, a new classic film was born. Of course, there was more to The Crow than just being a comic book movie, as there was also Brandon Lee’s passing during the film’s shooting, an absolute tragedy that added another layer of sadness to a film that was already very gloomy, and yet, the film managed to come up on top by just being a good film. 30 years later, Rupert Sanders and Lionsgate come back to the franchise with a remake that completely misses the point of the story it tries to tell.

The Crow Movie Review: Script Analysis

Without any sort of hyperbole, I have to say that The Crow might be one of the worst films of the year, and the reasons are many, as watching the film delivers you jewel after jewel of bad filmmaking, and just boring storytelling overall, with a script that misses every opportunity to create expectations, and intrigue about the characters, and just goes for full angst without knowing that angst by itself is not only boring, but also quite annoying.

Maybe it is a bit harsh to blame the script so much, I’m sure that what we are seeing right now on the screen is not exactly what it was on the page, and that is normal, scripts get destroyed more often than not during the shooting of a film, and there is basically nothing that the writers can do about it. Sadly, the end result is a film that has zero sense of structure, and dwells countless minutes on things no one wants to see, it is in many ways as if the script was in its original state, a pilot for a TV series, instead of a complete script for a film.

I say this because one of the most important decisions a writer has a take when writing a story is deciding when to start the story; do it too early, and things might feel like drag, do it too late, and things will feel rushed, and for this remake of The Crow it seems the writers, Will Schneider, and Zach Baylin, decided to start things too early, making the first and second acts feel like devoid on any sense of meaningful events, which make the movie quite boring as a result.

This remake of The Crow is at a great disadvantage because we can compare each of its decisions in contrast with the original film, and in an unintended result, you will end up appreciating the original film a lot more after watching this, because the original film knows when to start the story, knows how to create emotion, and also how to draw characters efficiently while focusing the mayor bulk of the story on Eric and his search for revenge, in other words, all the things that The Crow remake decides not to do.

The Crow Movie Review: Star Performance

Because the film fails at creating memorable characters, all the actors find themselves in a sort of limbo when it comes to delivering a performance. Director Rupert Sanders has never been known for extracting the best performances out of his actors, and The Crow keeps that tradition alive, with Bill Skarsgård repeating his performance from Boy Kills World, but without the crazy context of that movie to support it, which results in a very bland performance that doesn’t ring true with the passion driven character he is supposed to play.

Meanwhile, FKA Twigs takes the role of Shelly, Eric’s love, and she, like the rest of the actors fails at creating something compelling out of the script, but sadly, Twigs becomes the worst offender, because while the other actors seem lost, she is just not a good actress. FKA Twigs’ line delivery is as annoying as it can get, and her efforts to transform Shelly into an ethereal being ends up being quite cringy. Twigs has many other films in production, so we can only hope she has been getting acting lessons in the meantime.