The Crow (2024) Is the Cinematic Equivalent of a Flat Soda

For the vast majority of 2024, the worst film I had seen was Jerry Seinfeld’s Unfrosted, a mean-spirited parody of the capital-B Branded Product movie (think Air) that held everyone and everything from performers advocating for unionization to astronauts to its audience in sneering contempt. The astronaut bashing is so constant and so vicious that I wonder if an astronaut grievously wronged Seinfeld at some point. It’s a dire, sour-hearted film—albeit one that’s unapologetically bizarre—enough that one (1) of its jokes lands through the sheer chutzpah of its nonsense. The Rupert Sanders-directed The Crow, a new adaptation of James O’Barr’s well-loved comic of the same name, lacks even that dubious achievement. With a callow caw, it’s usurped Unfrosted’s seat on the cardboard throne of 2024’s worst movie—at least for my money. 

Bill Skarsgård is Eric Draven, a severely traumatized young man who’s lived most of his life in the neglectful care of the state of Michigan. Eric’s a talented artist (albeit one with terrible taste in tattoos) and sort of poet, but he’s too lost in himself to see his creativity as anything more than something he does. Eric drifts through his days in a fugue. Until he meets Shelly (FKA Twigs). Shelly, like Eric, has had a rough, rough run—albeit on a different road than Eric. Once a promising pianist, she’s living with multiple addictions and a mortal terror of the frighteningly wealthy power broker Roeg (Danny Huston). In Eric, Shelly sees someone “beautifully broken.” In Shelly, Eric sees a world beyond his hurt and regret. When Roeg’s goon squad comes looking for Shelly at the rehab center where she’s been sent, Eric helps her make a break for it. The two young lovers re-enter the world together, and for a little while, everything’s more or less ok.

 It doesn’t last. Roeg wants Shelly dead for reasons both practical and fantastical. Thus, when he gets a bead on her, he dispatches the goon squad. He has no idea who Eric is, but when he stumbles across what was supposed to be an execution, the goons are all too happy to off him too. And then he comes to in a ruined train station, filled to the brim with crows and watched over by a raggedy man who knows the score. The books need to be balanced. Eric and Shelly’s death was too terrible and left in its wake a great sadness. With Shelly’s soul in the clutches of the devil, it falls to Eric to wise fwom his gwabe and cash Roeg and his gang of ritzily-dressed killers’ checks. As long as his love for Shelly remains pure, he’ll heal from anything and everything. He’s not invincible, but he is indestructible—and that might just be enough to play the reaper and bring himself back. 

The 2024 Crow is substantially more lore-heavy than Alex Proyas’ 1994 take on the comic, but it’s all so much nothing. As elaborately as the picture explains the rules of Eric’s resurrection and Roeg’s centuries-long business relationship with the Devil, it offers those rules and their exposition in place of character or feeling.

Huston’s played his share of wicked wealthy schmucks, but while we know the what of Roeg, we never get the why or the who. He’s a cipher whose stated reason for doing evil isn’t matched by a drive to animate that reason. There is a tantalizing hint that he might be sick of his status quo and looking for a loophole that will let him welch on his bargain with Satan, but it goes nowhere. He’s a hundreds-of-years-old Satanist who owns most of Detroit and commands a small army and he’s bland.

While the 2024 Eric and his audience hear all about what he can do with his resurrection, the why is blurred to illegibility. On paper Eric and Shelly have the space to show how and why their love for each other lifts them up, why it would drive Eric to unleash brutal vengeance on Roeg and his chums. In practice, Skarsgård and Twigs do their damnedest, and The Crow’s film-craft in turn does its damnedest to get in their way. For all the time The Crow gives Eric and Shelly to be more than their violent deaths, it does not use that time well. A sizable chunk of Eric and Shelly’s screentime as a couple is given over to montages. They frolic—but their dialogue is limited to eye-roll-inducing platitudes that largely stick to one mode: angsty ennui Constantly They party—with ostensible friends they barely interact with and who the audience learns nothing about. They make enthusiastic love—that The Crow’s camera presents tepidly and with minimal eroticism. It dials down the color on Skarsgård and Twigs’ chemistry until it’s a blank screen. It does the same for their individual stories. Skarsgård is restricted to “a morose jerk, albeit one who’s hurting.” Twigs is caught up in Roeg’s empty but story-dominating lore. The Crow’s insistence that Eric and Shelly’s love is so great that Eric would crawl back from oblivion to do right by Shelly rings hollow.

 The emptiness that clips The Crow’s emotional wings haunts its action as well. Eric’s being a terrible fighter who’s scrambling to learn as he goes along and relying on his indestructibility to win the day has the space to be an interesting riff on superhuman abilities as an action tool, but the fights are neither long enough nor creative enough for the idea to bloom. Skarsgård fumbles, walks off agony, shoots someone. Lather, rinse, repeat. His fighting doesn’t improve until it does, and that improvement is more a cheat code than a level-up. While the big climactic swordfight that occurs post-Eric’s powering up has a few enjoyably grody moments, it’s weightless. It’s Eric vs. the ACME Goons-in-a-Box: Security Guard Edition. None of them can rival him, but his domination is choreographed so blandly that his newfound invincibility doesn’t register. Moreover, Eric’s katana receives special attention from the camera, but he has no personal connection to it. It’s not Innigio Montoya’s father’s sword, or Jubei Yagyu’s God-slaying Muramasa katana. it’s a  disposable tool given too much attention.

Attention. That’s The Crow’s greatest failing. It ignores potentially interesting angles in favor of go-nowhere lore. It tries to give Eric and Shelly’s romance space for its violent interruption to hurt but is more interested in the impression of feeling than actual feelings. It builds an interesting formula for its action but doesn’t work with that formula so much as repeat it until it’s discarded in favor of another formula that ultimately comes to nothing. At every turn, The Crow zugs when it could zig or zag. The result is a dull, obnoxious movie so boring it ticks me off.

I regret spending my $13 dollars on The Crow. Pending another dethroning, blow your off-key bagpipes and kazoos to hail the worst film of 2024.

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