‘The Crow’ Review: An Unnecessary Adaptation that Misses the Point of Its Source Material
Poor choices were made, and The Crow is the result.
Table of Contents
What is The Crow About?
If you’ve seen the 1994 film version of The Crow, or if you’ve read James O’Barr’s original comics, then you’ll have an idea of the genre that The Crow (2024) is in. It’s a dark action-thriller about love, loss, and vengeance. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. This movie is a re-adaptation of the comics (with small elements also echoing the 1994 film), but it takes significant liberties with the source material.
In this new version of The Crow, Eric and Shelly are two broken individuals who come together during a low point in each of their lives. They fall for each other, and theirs is a love story cut short by Roeg, an evil man from Shelly’s past. Shelly and Eric are killed, but Eric is able to return to the land of the living to “put the wrongs things right” by killing Roeg and the rest of his people responsible for Shelly’s murder.
Rupert Sanders (Ghost in the Shell, Snow White and the Huntsman) directed The Crow based on a script from Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider. Bill Skarsgård and FKA twigs star as Eric and Shelly, and the villain Roeg and his assistant Marian are played by Danny Huston and Laura Birn.
The Crow Review
As a word of warning, this review might be a little too self-indulgent for some readers. If you want to jump ahead to the main part of the review, skip the next couple of paragraphs. I have some things I need to get off my chest first.
If you’re a regular reader of Creepy Catalog, then you might have read an article I wrote a few months ago about why The Crow (2024) shouldn’t exist. I still stand by every word (with one slight modification explained in the next paragraph), but towards the bottom of the article I stated that I “likely won’t pay to see it in a theater.” What happened? Why did I spend time and money on The Crow? Well, I did say “likely,” because I knew curiosity might get the better of me. And, believe it or not, for whatever inexplicable reason, I felt like I needed to give it a shot. Plus, the buzz online the day after its release in theaters was so negative (it’s sitting at 20% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes as I write this) that it piqued my interest. Could it really be that bad? Well…
Before I get to the reviewing in earnest, I do need to make one amendment to what I wrote in my previous article about why I didn’t want The Crow. One of my main points was that the movie was using the name “Eric Draven” instead of just “Eric,” and Eric Draven is the name created for the 1994 movie. The character Eric Draven is Brandon Lee’s, and that’s part of why using that specific name for the new movie felt wrong. But, after watching The Crow (2024), they never actually say Eric’s last name. He’s just “Eric,” and he’s even listed in the credits by that mononym. In my defense, the press and marketing material absolutely used the full Eric Draven name at the time I wrote that article. The official marketing has been changed since then, and I know this because articles directly quoting the official write-ups from the time still say Eric Draven. So, since he’s just “Eric,” I can treat this new version as a completely different entity. I choose to imagine Eric in the new movie as a character who is completely unrelated to Brandon Lee’s character, and the names Eric and Shelly are just wild coincidences. Or maybe it’s fate. Either way, that makes me feel a little better about spending money on the movie. What made me feel less good about spending money on the movie was sitting down and watching the movie.
As an adaptation of James O’Barr’s original comics, The Crow (2024) is a spectacular failure. It completely changes/misses the point of the original story, and for seemingly no good reason. The biggest examples of this are the most basic ideas present in the story. The comics are about grief, anger, loss, and even madness. Eric is driven by revenge, and the strength of his need for revenge is directly proportional to the love that he feels for Shelly. The 2024 movie is more about bargaining. Eric has the ability to save Shelly, to bring her back from the dead, if he kills the people who killed her (or, it seems like just killing the main bad guy, Roeg, will do the trick).
The drastic change in motivations from the comic to the new movie completely alters the message of the story. The source material explores the destructive nature of grief and finds release within that. It’s about finally being able to let go, or at least to move on. The new adaptation explores unnecessary mystical lore as a means of undoing what has been done. It’s about sacrifice to an extent, but it mostly just avoids the “letting go” part. It brings up a question I’ve asked before: If an adaptation deviates from the source material to the extent that the two works are almost completely separate entities, then why adapt at all? Why not just make a completely new, unrelated story? I’ll just leave that as a rhetorical question.
Let’s forget about The Crow being an adaptation though. Is it a good movie as its own, standalone thing? Well, it’s not great. It looks good a lot of the time, and the fight scenes are entertaining enough (despite an overuse of obvious CGI blood which is a pet peeve of mine). The fights aren’t particularly meaningful though, even though director Rupert Sanders has spoken about trying to get audiences emotionally invested in the violence Eric perpetrates. Most of the people Eric kills are random henchmen with no personalities, which is fine when creating entertaining action scenes, but it doesn’t resonate emotionally.
The best parts of the movie are Bill Skarsgård and FKA twigs. They are suitably charming together, and they have good chemistry on screen as doomed lovers. As good as they are though, their performances can’t prop up the movie’s rickety plot.
The Crow is an idea that doesn’t need a complex plot. It should focus on emotion, and too much plot can get in the way of that. The comics were almost lyrical in how they approached the story. The 1994 movie added a lot of plot, but it was all in service of the emotions and characters. The Crow (2024) focuses way too much on unnecessarily convoluted plotting which gets in the way of strong character moments. So many people in this movie are just props used to propel the story forward. This plot nonsense also derails the emotional heart of the story, which is the love between Eric and Shelly.
If you want to completely avoid spoilers, skip these next few paragraphs and just go to the next section of the article. For those of you still with me, there are two major plot choices that really hurt the movie. One is giving Shelly a backstory that is tied directly to the movie’s main villain, Roeg. It’s not needed, and having Shelly be involved with Roeg, even unwillingly, is what leads to Eric’s love for Shelly coming into question (which is actually a pivotal plot point that leads directly into the finale). The problem is that, ironically, even though the director wanted to add more screen time for Shelly to get audiences to care about her more, by doing so he actually made Eric and Shelly’s love feel less pure than it does in any previous incarnation.
The second major plot choice that hurts the movie is making Roeg a supernatural being. He’s kind of like a vampire, but he does a “blood brother” handshake rather than drinking blood. He kills innocent people and sends their souls to Hell so he can live for a very long time, and he can influence people’s minds by whispering into their ear. The specifics are somewhat vague, and that’s part of the problem. It’s another wrinkle added to the plot just to try to make sense of the bargaining Eric does to save Shelly from the afterlife. Once again, it’s unnecessary.
And then we have the ending. I won’t spoil it, but all it does is raise more questions than answers. Frankly, I wasn’t really enjoying The Crow up to that point, but I wasn’t actively disliking it. But the ending really pushed it over the edge for me. Bad endings can color the way you look at an entire movie, and that’s what happened here. The ending makes sense in a metaphorical way, but it does not add up in any way that makes sense with what the rest of the movie has established. And since the movie relies so heavily on plot, not making logical sense in the end is aggravating. I really don’t know what they were thinking with that ending.
The Crow Rating and Recommendation
Star Rating: 2 out of 5
The Crow gets two stars because Bill Skarsgård and FKA twigs are good in it, the fighting might be enjoyable if you like modern action movies, and the visuals are nice a lot of the time. But the story choices cannot be overlooked, and they make a mess of something that should be straightforward and emotional. The Crow is not recommended for fans of the 1994 movie, and it’s not recommended for fans of James O’Barr’s comics. It’s not really recommended for anyone other than the morbidly curious and die-hard fans of tragic romances mixed with violent action.
Further Reading
- Strange Darling Review
- Faceless After Dark Review
- Bag of Lies Review
- The Crow Remake Shouldn’t Exist (but I also don’t want it to fail)
- Best Bird Horror Movies
