There’s a haunting simplicity to James O’Barr’s comic book “The Crow.” The story claims that sometimes — only sometimes — people die under such sad circumstances that their soul can’t rest, so they’re guided back to the land of the living by a crow, in order “to put the wrong things right.” It’s a tale of grief, mostly stuck in the “anger” phase, in which a beautiful walking corpse metes out violent vengeance against the unapologetically evil.
Alex Proyas’ feature film adaptation of “The Crow” was itself the source of overwhelming tragedy when its star, Brandon Lee — the son of martial arts icon Bruce Lee — died in an accident on set. This context can make Proyas’ film hard to watch: Lee’s complicated portrayal of a sad soul coming to terms with pain and mortality hits extremely close to home. But his performance also makes the film incredibly powerful. Proyas’ direction isn’t literal, setting the story inside a brutally gothic poem, where beauty can only be found beneath a rain-slicked heap of misery. It’s a film of profound sadness even with its exciting action sequences and best-selling soundtrack, packed with the gloomiest hit songs of the mid-1990s.
Thirty years, three sequels and one short-lived TV series later (we won’t dwell on those, except to say “The Crow: Wicked Prayer” is actually pretty good), and we finally have a new “The Crow” on the big screen. And while it makes sense that a different filmmaker would have a different take on the material, what’s surprising about Rupert Sanders’ interpretation is that it’s emotionally ineffectual. This new remake takes the simplest story in the world and makes its plot and the mythology weirdly complicated, to the point that it all becomes total nonsense.
In this version, Eric Draven (Bill Skarsgård) is a recovering addict who falls in love with Shelly (FKA Twigs) in rehab. Except they’re not just in rehab, oh no. Shelly is in rehab because she has a secret video of a billionaire supernatural supervillain named Roeg (Danny Huston), and while running from his killer goons she stumbled into the cops. The cops found her drugs, and if the film’s editing is to be believed — which I wouldn’t actually recommend — she was sent to rehab the same night.
So Shelly and Eric fall in love because of a supervillain plot, and they escape rehab and go on the run for — again, if the editing is to be believed — either one very eventful day or a few weeks or months. In any case nobody is looking for them very hard, even at their own apartments, and by the time Roeg’s henchmen do finally track them down they’ve fallen in deep infatuation with each other. The script, credited to Zach Baylin (“King Richard”) and William Josef Schneider, would like us to believe that they’ve fallen in love but a drug-addled tryst in which they pointedly avoid getting to know each other on a deep personal level just doesn’t have that effect, no matter how longingly Skarsgård and Twigs stare at each other.
Anyway, Roeg’s underlings finally kill them both and Eric wakes up in a dilapidated train station where an entity called Kronos (Sami Bouajila, “A Son”) explains that Shelly is going to hell, but Eric can save her if he comes back to life and kills Roeg because that guy sold his soul to the devil, which is bad, and apparently everyone who works with him is fair game as well.
Perhaps you can see how the elegant simplicity of “The Crow” is getting lost here. Rupert Sanders, whose 2017 remake of “Ghost in the Shell” was an even bigger misfire, lets this tale get overloaded with unnecessary and elaborate contrivance, until the core of it all — the grief over losing a loved one — no longer tracks. Eric doesn’t seem like an avenging angel, he seems like a guy who took a plea bargain and didn’t read the paperwork before he signed it.
By the time “The Crow” finally gets to its mayhem, which is a very long time, Sanders almost makes it worth our while. Eric can’t die and he can heal from any injury but he always feels the pain. It hurts to push his small intestine back into his stomach. It hurts to get his eardrums ruptured. It hurts to get stabbed through the chest with a samurai sword. The so-called “healing factor” that superheroes like Deadpool and Wolverine enjoy can often undermine their fight scenes because it feels like nothing is at stake — those two go at it like Looney Tunes. The filmmakers of “The Crow,” despite messing up almost everything else, have solved this problem: Eric might not die if he gets injured but he will suffer, and nobody wants that.
It’s also a disarming delight to see an action hero with no action hero skills whatsoever. Eric survives his violent encounters through sheer endurance, like the boxer in Mark Robson’s “The Harder They Fall.” All our hero has to do is keep at it until his opponents make a mistake, which makes him more sympathetic. He’s an average guy thrust into a bizarre situation.
All this might make “The Crow” worth recommending for the violence alone, except there’s not as much of it as you might think, and the actual execution of Eric’s executions can be baffling. There’s a centerpiece at an opera house where Eric brutally murders dozens of security guards, which is enjoyably outsized and gruesome, but it goes on so long that you start to wonder — he’s killing a lot of people who work at this opera house, and they can’t all be evil, right? Surely some of these guys are just trying to stop a homicidal maniac who walked into the lobby and started stabbing people? And how loud are those opera singers that they can drown out countless gunshots? And how did Eric even get in there with a sword in his hands, without a ticket? Did he kill the ticket-taker too? Is the ticket-taker also evil? What kind of evil can a ticket-taker do?
And come to think of it, why does an evil immortal billionaire go to all this trouble because of a cell phone video taken by a drug addict? You’re telling me that Satan’s emissary on Earth doesn’t have access to any good lawyers?
When you stifle the emotional simplicity of a story like “The Crow” to emphasize the plot, the plot had better make sense. And it doesn’t. It’s got perplexing rules and a vague chronology and nothing seems like it matters anymore. This remake understands the basic thrust of the original story but not what made it function, and while it’s sometimes goofy enough to be entertaining, in the end it’s for the birds.
“The Crow” opens exclusively in theaters on Friday, Aug. 23.
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