Rupert Sanders
The Crow - Il Corvo

Bruce Willis, in The Last Boy Scout, said: Water is wet, the sky is blue, and women have secrets. I can also add: bands have reunions and movies have remakes. That's just how it is. Deal with it. We can discuss it all we want, debate whether it's right to take old, moldy IPs out of the closet to give them a facelift or if it's not right to capitalize on people's nostalgia and fond memories, but these are academic talks: as long as there is hope to make a few bucks, remakes are made and will continue to be made, as they always have been, in Hollywood as in the rest of the world.

Personally, I have never really understood all this furious hostility toward remakes. The most logical thing to do is also the most obvious: you think you won't like the movie? Don't go see it, save yourself two hours of liver damage and avoid feeding the unscrupulous Hollywood machine. I struggle to understand the reasoning that leads one to believe that THE REMAKE RUINS THE ORIGINAL!!1. It's just not true. First of all, it's not like if a new version of a cinema classic comes out, task forces will come to your house to smash your old blu-ray. History teaches us that if the remake is better than the original, it rightly replaces it in memory (The Thing, The Fly...); if it's worse, it disappears quietly without causing damage. Which, I fear, will be the fate of The Crow 2024.

The Crow is an ugly film. Let's say it right away and get it out of the way. It's a bit better than I imagined but worse than I hoped: I'd like to say it's the best Crow movie since the original, but 1) that's not much of a challenge 2) I'm not sure it's better than City Of Angels, I mean, that at least had Iggy Pop as a villain, I should at least revisit it. Let’s also say right away that it's not a bad movie because of the new Eric's trapper look, as many decided from the first scene photo. Here I want to open a parenthesis: it's unbearable to see adults in their forties tearing their clothes over the Crow's look. In 1994, if you wanted a cool and marketable Crow, you had to dress him like Trent Reznor; in 2024, you have to dress him like Side Baby. Deal with it. It's not a movie for you; it's a film meant for kids, just like the original. What is an 18-year-old supposed to do with a guy dressed in the fashion of thirty years ago? In 1994, would you have been thrilled by a Crow dressed like a Beatle? Exactly. Putting a Brandon Lee cosplayer in it won't bring Brandon Lee back to life, nor will it give you back your hair or your adolescence. End of parenthesis.

So it's not the fault of trap, which is completely absent from the (disappointing and unfocused) soundtrack; instead, the obligatory Joy Division are present, the only nod to fan service in the entire film. The absence of winks is something that, in my eyes, earns points but perhaps has further alienated the favor of original fans, who belong to that generation that wants to be courted, served, and revered in the cinema; rather, they forcibly sought the favor of zoomers, who do not go to the cinema or, in any case, do not want ass-kissing. This error in evaluating their own target by itself is relatively serious, but that is also not why The Crow is a flop.

The Crow is a flop because the (necessarily important) aesthetic framework lacks the rest of the picture. The two protagonists are, on paper, more developed than in the original and the comic, but paradoxically, this move does not pay off: it takes away from the story the universality that made it successful. The love between Eric and Shelly was so unreal, archetypal, and idealized that any teenager could agonize over it, just like the subsequent tragedy and revenge were so emotional that any teenager could identify with it. In the remake, this greater depth does not help: Eric and Shelly become two problematic teenagers with whom it becomes difficult to empathize, mainly due to the inadequacy of the actors.

The two protagonists and the villain compete throughout the film on who has less charisma. Skarsgård, usually good elsewhere, is awkward, disoriented, and sleepy both as Eric and as the Crow; he slightly improves in the more violent scenes but makes it impossible to root for him, and understand this well: if in a film like this you can't root for the good guy, there's a colossal problem. Danny Houston's villain is even worse: he's non-existent like Agilulfo, ridiculous, as intriguing as your accountant, a void that sucks in all interest for what happens on the screen. Your depth is lacking: it's minimal, sang Neffa in the good old days; let's kindly overlook his supernatural powers, a good idea on paper but that practically brings The Crow back to the dark days of bad comic book movies of twenty years ago. Of the three, FKA Twigs comes out less bad: she puts in a lot of effort to bring life to a character who originally was just a narrative function, an abstract, ethereal angel-woman, a human McGuffin. Too bad she appears on screen too little to make a difference, and for half of that time, she has an inane face that is supposed to be (I imagine) an expression of adoring love but instead makes her look like a Goldeen. Remember Goldeen, the Pokémon? Exactly.

If in an emotional and instinctive story like the Crow you don't perfectly hit the main characters, more than perfect, the film collapses. That's what, even more than capturing its aesthetics and zeitgeist, makes the difference between the 1994 film and all the Crows that came after. Without the characters, what remains is a scrawny and silly plot culminating in one of the most floppy and bland climaxes I can remember, a glossy Balenciaga mega-ad set in the usual nocturnal and rainy suburbs, populated by derelict extras and yet so glam, like in that Zoolander fashion show; and potentially valuable additions like the Rated R, insistent violence up to gore, decently choreographed action scenes, and showing the two teenage protagonists having sex and doing drugs without making morality or provoking itch mean nothing; they rather seem like a clumsy lure to vainly disguise the movie's insubstantiality.

What a shame, truly. Because you can sense the intent, behind the scenes, to make a good Crow movie without the typical elbow-nudge wink wink of servile Disney-era remakes; you can sense the desire to smash everything and create a new iconic movie for zoomers like Proyas' was for GenX, but you don't create icons in vitro. Especially if you lack adequate actors to use as test tubes.