The Crow Gossip Review

The Crow Gossip Review

While bad films might also possess integrity, good films invariably do. This idea is clearly illustrated in “The Crow,” which tells the story of a man who is killed together with the love of his life and returns from the afterlife to exact revenge on her. There are a lot of unsatisfactory parts of it (such as a symbolically dense recurrent flashback to a childhood trauma that sent the protagonist, Eric Draven, into a mental hospital), but you have to sort of accept that the main love story is strong because it has to be and because the actors are endearing. The terrifying main event that propels the entire narrative is slowly introduced in Zach Baylin and William Schneider’s script, and it takes until the very end of the film for the hero to transform into The Crow, a self-painted angel of death with a Joker-like appearance. And I’ll get to a bunch of other concerns and problems eventually.

However, at the end, it has an unanticipatedly strong metaphysical system underpinning the plot and a low-key assurance about its identity and methods. This movie follows a morally upright path in that regard, all the way to its conclusion, which is true to the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe and John Keats as well as the source material, James O’Barr’s graphic novel. Unlike reality show contestants, who like to claim that their goal is to make friends, this movie is here to be true to itself. In the style of an art-house/grindhouse thriller like “Drive” or “Only God Forgives,” the violence is flamboyantly, deliberately exaggerated, and shockingly cruel even by revenge-thriller standards. It seems as though the film is trying its hardest to shock a crowd that believes itself to be unshockable.

The choice to devote a significant amount of time to presenting us with the wide-eyed, melancholic Eric Draven (Bill Skarsgård) before his transformation into a supernatural being, as well as to portraying Eric’s girlfriend Shelly (musician FKA Twigs), a reclusive figure on the periphery of the goth underground who is fleeing a sinister secret, as a unique individual with a past, pays off quite well into the narrative, despite some initially tedious material. After Shelly dies, the film takes a turn that, without giving anything away, is so firmly capital-R Romantic—in a “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” kind of way—that, in a time when sincerity is automatically written off as “cringe,” the film deserves praise for even taking that risk. It also deserves praise for sticking with the decision all the way to the dramatic, inevitable conclusion and giving viewers the satisfying, even if not particularly happy, ending.

It is true that there is no universe in which this film qualifies as a great film, let alone one that is essentially commercial. Though they seem fully committed to the love story, Skarsgård and Twigs don’t fare much better. Twigs is likeable but provides a fairly poor performance. If the characters hadn’t appeared stoned even when they weren’t doing drugs, it might have made a difference. Too much of the stereotypical “lovers frolicking” montage material—which seems to want to be charged with secondary meaning—is used by director Rupert Sanders (“Snow White and the Huntsman,” the live-action “Ghost in the Shell”) in the scene where Eric kisses Shelly through a sheer white curtain that resembles a burial shroud. Later, in a “Titanic”-like scene, Shelly sinks into the murk of a harbor despite Eric’s outstretched hand. It would have been more beneficial to replace these with more real-life scenes where the two act like normal people. This, along with the film’s intense violence and depressing conclusion, perhaps explains why Lionsgate, the film’s studio, is abandoning “The Crow” without press screenings and with (very) no marketing or advertising.

This seems like a mistake, though, despite all its flaws and disappointments, such as a lack of creative compositions and some muddy or milky nighttime photography. The film has a certain something, an aura, or perhaps just a clear purity of intent, which should shield it from accusations that it’s merely a cash-grab remake. A movie like this one, “The Crow,” which has a 19th-century, black-and-kneeling-by-the-tombstone notion of True Love, is too ambitious for anyone in show business to commit to. In order to set character motivations in context and allow the film to progress beyond the cliché of “bad guys kill hero’s girl, hero comes back to kill bad guys,” which is essentially what Alex Proyas (“Dark City”) accomplished when he first adapted James O’Barr’s source comic thirty years ago, the film has also gone to the trouble of creating a thorough cosmology.

The antagonist in this film, Roeg (played by Danny Huston, the go-to bad guy), is not your average human criminal; rather, he’s a nasty, strong creature who, according to his own description, has existed for a very long time and has the capacity to corrupt humans. Roeg is presumably named after the legendary director Nicolas Roeg. In contrast to earlier cinematic adaptations of The Crow’s legends, this one delves deeply into the paranormal and goes well beyond the cliché of bringing the deceased lead back to life. This movie presents evil as a power source or force that can be carried and weaponized, changing and destroying people, much like horror movies about devils, demons, and stolen souls. This helps to align the narrative with the myth of Orpheus, who sets out to rescue his bride Eurydice from Hades, even though the majority of this “Crow”‘s metaphysical development sequences take place in a purgatorial in-between zone.

As the characterizations were flat or iconic and the look was based on then-current music videos, album covers, and comic book art, Proyas’ version was probably always going to end up as an example of a film in which style was substance. It had to embrace that aesthetic much harder after its star, Brandon Lee, was killed by a prop gun before he was done filming his scenes. The production team pieced something releasable together using silhouetted body doubles and rudimentary compositing. As a result, the movie was haunted by death in a number of ways. Hopefully enough time has passed to be able to claim that audiences’ awareness of the trauma that gave birth to the film meant that, even if the final product was better than it had any right to be, it received more love and affection. (For the record, I loved Proyas’s “The Crow” and finished the cassette version of the soundtrack when it first came out.)

The 1994 movie was more focused, dynamic, and deftly handled than this updated version. It’s a melancholy muck with a hint of legends and horror movies from Northern Europe. It is a neo-noir film about a big, terrible metropolis, and it pours rain throughout. While Lee’s Eric Draven was a cunning imp, Skarsgård is a buff, ripped character who doesn’t attempt to imitate Lee’s dancer-like grace; instead, he’s more like a menacing clay golem, sent to kill the evil.

That’s alright, too. It’s an unconventional strategy, but in the end, it not only works, the movie is progressing nearly against all odds. The “Crow” most clearly understands itself when it depicts Eric’s decision to become what he saw and absolve himself of the love that improved him while Shelly was alive. Eric has retooled himself into a murdering machine in the name of justice and redemption. Edgar Allan Poe’s lyric, “Years of love have been forgotten, In the hatred of a minute,” is evocative of the onscreen effect. Every scene, particularly in the latter half, appears to be receiving creative direction from a coded secret frequency that is only audible to the creators and inaccessible to any other popular picture this year. There were moments in the movie that made me feel uneasy, even though it wasn’t “working” in the traditional sense.

In one scenario, Shelly and Eric are strolling across a bridge when Shelly makes a serious comment about jumping. They assume that a double jump would result in their deaths, and Shelly imagines that youngsters would build shrines to them. Teens will, I believe, eventually create their own shrines to this film, each in their own unique style. It’s the type of film that, if you watched it when you were fourteen, you would see ten or twenty more times and be motivated to borrow books from the library and perhaps even learn some poetry by heart.