It Turns Out We Do NOT Need Another Adaptation of The Crow

Whoda thunk it?

I’d like to start by thanking the four people who answered my desperate plea and upgraded from free to paid subscribers. While twenty dollars a month doesn’t mean much to most people, it means the world to me. If nothing else, struggling professionally and financially has made me appreciative for, well, everything. 

Every time I get an email informing me that someone has become a subscriber to this newsletter or bought one of my books from me, I experience a surge of pride and excitement. It means that someone is supporting me in a concrete, meaningful way. It also means that I am doing better rather than worse in at least one aspect of my career. 

I’m also pleased that while I’m way the fuck behind in many aspects of my life and career, I’m a little ahead here. That’s right: I’ve already written up Police Academy: Mission to Moscow and Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge. Those pieces promise to be game-changers!

If you become a paid subscriber to this newsletter, you get to control me. I am professionally obligated to do your bidding, even if that entails watching and writing about the latest reboot of The Crow. 

When I saw that The Crow was returning to the big screen for the first time since 2005’s poorly received The Crow: Wicked Prayer, I naively assumed that the filmmakers must have a good reason to make a new Crow movie. I adorably hypothesized that they must have found a new angle on the character or developed a strong script. 

It’s happened before. At the turn of the century, a Crow sequel was in the works called The Crow: Lazarus, which would have starred DMX and focused on a rapper who is killed in a drive-by shooting and then enacts posthumous revenge on his killers. 

The Crow: Lazurus sounds surreally, uniquely awful. I am very disappointed that it was never made. Instead, the franchise chose to make Edward Furlong, who is better known for being troubled than for being an actor, the new Crow. 

The result was less than rapturously received. It played for one week in Seattle, scoring a zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes, before receiving a discreet direct-to-video burial. 

That was the universe saying it did not want more of The Crow. Hollywood refused to listen. 

A fifth cinematic adaptation of The Crow has been in development for so long that at one point, Bradley Cooper, an A-list actor, writer and director who has as many Oscar nominations (12) as Jack Nicholson and Katherine Hepburn despite still being in his forties, was slated to play a character last realized onscreen by Edward Furlong. 

Seemingly half of the actors in Hollywood were in contention for the role. Bill Skarsgard, who ended up playing the role, wasn’t even the first member of his immediate family to be considered for the role. 

Bill’s brother Alexander was previously associated with the project, but that was eleven long years ago. 

After an eternity in development hell, The Crow lurched onscreen with Bill Skarsgard in the lead role of Eric Draven and Ghost in the Shell helmer Rupert Sanders in the director’s chair. 

The underwhelming result betrays that they did not wait until they had an amazing script before bringing the deadest man in superhero comic books back from the great beyond. 

The Crow exists because the 1994 adaptation was a hit with a cult following, and it’s a superhero IP with an “edge” like Joker, Venom, The Punisher, and Morbius.  

Skarsgard plays The Crow’s gloomy anti-hero as a collection of uniquely hideous tattoos in human form. He’s got a shaved mullet that finishes the job of making a handsome actor look like an ugly degenerate. 

Everybody hurts here, but no one hurts more soulfully and dramatically than Eric. Unfortunately, Eric is addicted to more than just shitty tattoos. He’s an addict who ends up in rehab, where he is treated like a criminal rather than someone with a sickness. 

Eric starts a rehab romance with Shelly (FKA Twigs), a fellow weary survivor with a taste for darkness and drugs.   The two eventually bust out and resume their love affair with illicit substances and each other. 

Shelly has seen and done things so dark that the world cannot forgive her, albeit at the behest of Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), a demonic crime lord who has been doing the devil’s bidding on Earth in exchange for eternal life. 

Eric and Shelly are Goths in love until they end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Shelly remains dead, but Eric wakes up in a lazily realized purgatory where spirit guide Kronos (Sami Bouajila) tells him that if he kills everyone responsible for his death and Shelly’s death, she will come back to him. 

The Crow is a gothic romance for people who think Joker and Harley Quinn are the perfect couple much longer than you would expect. The action, such as it is, takes forever to kick in. The film does not improve when its focus shifts from doomed

lovers to mindless bloodshed. 

The Crow sets itself apart largely through gratuitous violence. Nothing about Eric suggests he possesses Jason Bourne/James Bond-level killing abilities. Dying seems to have agreed with him, however. 

I’m usually annoyed by montage sequences that dramatize how a hero becomes highly skilled in mass murder, often with the assistance of a mentor, but I could have used one of those here. Skarsgard most recently acted in 2023’s Boy Kills World. He kills the world all over again here.

The violence in The Crow is like Eric’s tattoos: there’s too much of it, and it’s all almost impressively ugly. It’s also defined by quantity over quality. I enjoy an amoral bloodbath as much as anyone, but there’s a fundamental soullessness to the bloodshed that defeats the tragic romance at the film’s hollow core. 

Huston has played so many roles like this that I suspect that when he was offered the part, he asked his agent, “Wasn’t I already the bad guy in a Crow movie? Maybe fifteen years ago? I’m not sure, but I vaguely recall playing the bad guy. Or was it a Punisher movie? I have difficulty keeping track.” 

The older he gets, the more Danny Huston looks and sounds like his father. That is particularly true here. Chinatown heavy Noah Cross, Danny’s daddy’s most famous role, might have been Satanic in his evil but Huston’s big baddie is literally in league with the devil.

I suspect Danny Huston has already forgotten he was in The Crow. I saw it less than two days ago, and it’s already begun to escape my memory. 

The Crow ends by teasing a sequel, which feels more like a threat than a promise. This is probably not the final The Crow movie, but it should be. 

One and a Half Stars out of Five