I don’t know what I’ve done wrong, but I drew the short straw again and had to review The Crow. I had the short straw last time, it was a bit uncool of the guys not to show me their straws.
The remake of The Crow is now online and I sat down to watch it. I can tell you how bad it is, there’s still 45 minutes left and I’m writing this review. It’s terrible.
This new version stars Bill Skarsgard, FKA Twigs, Danny Huston, Josette Simon, Laura Birn and other people. Honestly, I can’t be arsed to type them out. I had to look up FKA Twigs, she’s a singer, apparently.
Rupert Saunders directs, he is known for Snow White and the Huntsman and the live-action Ghost in the Shell. Zach Baylin and William Schneider did the screenplay, based on the comic book by James O’Barr.
I liked Snow White and the Huntsman, mainly ‘coz Jessica Chastain was clad in leather with an Irish accent! I digress.
The Story
Shelly (Twigs) receives a video from her friend that incriminates a local crime lord. She uploads it to all social media, he is arrested and that’s the end of the movie.
Honestly, this would have stopped the movie dead in its tracks, but I guess uploading videos is impossible here.
Shelly is targeted, because of the video, and gets herself arrested. Instead of going to the police with the video, she gets arrested for drug possession. Shrug. So she ends up in a rehab place, which is mixed gender, which is something that totally happens.
She meets Eric (Skarsgard), he’s a troubled loser, with a horrible past and everyone hates him.
She obviously falls in love with him because girls like a fixer-upper I guess. The bad guys turn up for Shelly, so they escape, you know, just literally walk out of the place. All this nonsense is in the first 20 minutes and it doesn’t get better.
We spend the next 20 minutes watching Shelly and Eric fall in love, partying and basically living the good life until the bad guys turn up and kill them both. The end. No, wait, we’re only at the 40-minute mark.
What follows is Eric turning into the Crow, at about the 1 hour and 10-minute mark.
Basically, Vincent (Huston) is the main bad guy. He made a deal with the devil for immortal life, as long as he sends innocents to hell. Shelly is one of those innocents.
Eric ends up in some form of purgatory, which looks like an abandoned train station. He’s told he can rescue Shelly if his love is pure and that’s the rest of the plot.
Eric kills everyone to get Shelly back. I don’t know how it ends yet, but then, I don’t really care.
The Cast
Skarsgard isn’t all that good in this. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a great actor, but here, he’s just OK. Eric is a loser, covered with tattoos and Urkel would pick on him he’s so pathetic.
He’s not a likeable character, but then, I guess that’s half the point.
Huston is Huston. He plays the bad guy well, but he has a few movies. The expression ‘phoning it in’ kept springing to my mind.
Then we come on to FKA Twigs who is awful. As I said, she’s a ‘singer’, a singer turned actor. I’d stick with the singing love, I don’t think acting is your thing.
She’s completely unlikeable and, again as I said, I don’t care if she’s going to hell, heaven or having a weekend break at Disneyland.
I’m going to be extremely shallow here as well, but she’s not all that good-looking. The other day, Mrs Boba was watching some random TV rom-com movie.
It had Lacey Chabert in it, so I was happy to sit through the drivel of the story and just watch her on the screen. Twigs is not like that at all, I couldn’t wait for Shelly to die.
In The Crow, there was nothing appealing about twig at all. She’s a terrible actress and not all that good-looking. A movie is about caring about the characters, here, I didn’t care about anyone.
The Direction
Overall, the direction isn’t bad, in fact, in places, it’s very good. The visuals are impressive, the gore is well done and I can’t complain about the movie. It’s just the story that lets it down.
At the end, Eric heads to an opera, where Huston is hiding. He goes on a killing spree with poor, innocent henchmen. They all have guns and fill Eric with more lead than a 9B pencil.
Somehow, no one in the theatre hears a single gunshot. It’s edited to cover the gunshots, but it’s still stupid.
Also, there are a couple of love scenes, where Shelly and Eric are getting it on. Guess who we see naked and guess who we don’t see naked? Eric’s ass, yes, Shelly’s no. We can’t have naked females in movies anymore. This isn’t the 80s!
I don’t know who this movie is aimed at, are Emo’s a thing anymore? Girls who like Billie Eilish? I can’t picture who the target audience is for The Crow, not me, that’s for sure.
Overall
The Crow is just bad. It’s 2 hours I’m not getting back and I will never go back to re-examine it. I watch this stuff so you don’t have to.
I do want to go back and watch the Brandon Lee version again now though, so something good has come of this.
You know when you hear about a remake, reboot, reimagining of something and you roll your eyes and think it’s a bad idea. This is exactly what The Crow is, it’s a pointless re-whatever and can’t appeal to people who like the original and definitely not the ‘modern audience’.
I can see why it only took about $20 million worldwide at the box office.
The Crow is available to rent online but don’t bother, zero stars.
PS…I got to the end, Eric won and then it ended. That’s it. Shrug.
