What’s It About
Soulmates Eric Draven and Shelly Webster are brutally murdered when the demons of her dark past catch up with them. Given the chance to save his true love by sacrificing himself, Draven returns to seek bloody revenge against the killers, traversing the worlds of the living and the dead to put the wrong things right.
MOVIESinMO REVIEW
The latest iteration of The Crow is a disappointingly lifeless film that pales compared to the original. The Crow franchise has never been known for consistent success, and while the 1994 film became a cult classic, its three sequels were critically panned. This new installment attempts to revisit the character of Eric Draven, with Bill Skarsgård stepping into the role once played by Brandon Lee. Unfortunately, the results are underwhelming. Skarsgård’s performance isn’t inherently wrong, but the film does a disservice to both him and the character. It drags on for an agonizingly long time before reaching the point where the original movie began, and the journey to get there is anything but enjoyable. Some dialogue may provoke eye-rolls, and an excessive amount of time is spent on good and evil characters in which the audience has no emotional investment. From the outset, it’s clear that this version of The Crow isn’t attempting to replicate the 1994 film but rather reinterprets the characters with significant deviations from its predecessor. While the original movie opens with our protagonists already dead and Eric swiftly resurrected to seek vengeance on those who wronged him and his fiancée, this version takes a very different and ultimately unnecessary approach. Instead of diving straight into the revenge narrative, we are first introduced to Shelly, played by FKA twigs. She’s guarding a video and ends up in rehab, where she meets Eric. The original film only showed Eric and Shelly’s relationship through flashbacks. Still, this movie tries to explore their initial meeting, what bonds them, and then breaks our hearts when they are eventually murdered. The film opens with a pre-credits sequence showing Eric as a child grieving the loss of a horse—a scene meant to explain why he ends up in rehab as an emotionally shattered adult. The concept is intriguing, but the execution falls flat. Introducing these characters as two people escaping rehab together (with surprising ease) feels off, especially when contrasted with the original, where Eric confronts a woman for neglecting her daughter due to drug addiction. The movie unnecessarily complicates the characters. The villains are after Shelly because of a video containing incriminating evidence. Danny Huston plays Vincent Roeg, a crime lord with the eerie ability to control minds by whispering into people’s ears. One of the film’s most significant failings is the lack of chemistry between Skarsgård and Twigs. Their relationship feels shallow and rushed, more like a brief fling than a deep, meaningful connection. In the original, it was clear that Eric and Shelly had been together for a long time and were engaged to be married. In this version, their murder occurs just days after they meet, rendering it less impactful. Their romantic scenes lack substance, becoming surprisingly tedious after a while. Other films successfully convey powerful love connections with far fewer scenes. Still, this one fails even with the extended focus on their relationship. The negatives far outweigh the positives, making the film difficult to endure. Ultimately, this version of The Crow misses the mark in capturing the essence of love. It seems to misunderstand the depth of Eric’s love for Shelly, a profound love that even death couldn’t extinguish. Eric’s willingness to endure death repeatedly to avenge Shelly and reunite with her is a crucial aspect of the original story. However, in this film, the decision for Skarsgård’s Eric to trade his soul for Shelly’s robs the story of its emotional core, reducing it to a simplistic and unchallenging tale of martyrdom rather than the intense, driven narrative of a man consumed by love and loss.
OUR RATING – A BROKEN WINGS 3