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I come here today not to bury The Crow 2024 but to review it.

I’ve seen a lot of talk about The Crow, and much of it is placing it as the worst movie of 2024. There are reviews just absolutely trashing it and giving it bottom of the barrel scores. 

I’m just not sure those are entirely deserved.

I’ll say what the biggest difference between myself and those other reviewers who are obliterating The Crow 2024 with their words is: I’m not married to the original The Crow movie, and I certainly don’t see it as some kind of untouchable Grail that can’t ever be remade. I saw The Crow 1994 one time, shortly after it came out for rental, and I’m not going to lie: I remember virtually nothing about it. I’ll watch it again someday for the Stew World Order podcast when it gets pulled, but until then… it’s just something I saw and forgot all about.

Maybe upon seeing it again, I’ll love it. Or who knows? Maybe I’ll hate it. I have no idea. All I really know in the meantime is that the comic book it is based on is really bad. Sorry! But it is. 

Let’s get into the 2024 iteration, though, and review that as fairly as I can, based on its own merits, not just how it stands up to something I’ve built up in my head. 

The modern Crow is the story of a young man named Eric Draven, who we see early on is a resident of some kind of rehabilitation and correction facility… with a possible emphasis on the rehab part. We are not entirely sure why Eric is in the facility, but it may be tied into a fire from his youth? It’s not clear; we don’t really get any backstory on him up to the present day in his life other than that when he was a kid, a horse died. Or didn’t die? Maybe it was just wounded.

It’s weird. 

In the facility, he (Eric, not the horse) meets Shelley, a young woman who is also a drug addict and is running for her life, though we aren’t sure why. A friend of hers who was caught up in something involving Shelley was recently killed by villain expert Danny Huston’s character, and Shelley suspects she is next.

Shelley and Eric strike up a close friendship and flirtation inside the facility. But one day, Shelley sees Danny Huston’s minions coming for her, so they deign to escape. And… it’s just that easy. They cut off their ankle monitors and climb out a window. I guess this is about as low-security of an institution as you can get.

Free and out in the world, Eric and Shelley start up a whirlwind romance that swallows them up. We see them getting tattoos together. And clubbing. You know: romantic stuff. They kiss each other through a sheer curtain. I would say “who among us hasn’t kissed their partner through a sheer curtain”, but none of us have because WE DON’T KNOW the kind of love these two crazy kids have for each other!

Unfortunately, Shelley history catches up with them, and the pair are murdered while staring into each other’s eyes. The murder is so horrible–and their love so strong–that Eric wakes up in… Purgatory (?)… and is given the ability to return to life as The [guy that follows around a] Crow. He is tasked with putting right what was wronged to their relationship. 

And so the newly immortal Eric returns to the land of the living and starts tearing through those that were responsible for Shelley’s murder so that the two of them can be together again.

He’s… really bad at it at first.

But he gets better!

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ There is one undeniably great scene in The Crow 2024, and that is when a more powerful and more proficient Eric takes his skills to the opera where he thinks Danny Huston may be. When he gets there, he does not find the big bad final boss he is looking for, but he does discover a lot of armed underlings.

What follows is an incredibly brutal and gory fight scene where Eric cuts a swath through his foes, delighting in massacring them in increasingly vicious fashion. It’s a wildly visceral and bloody scene, especially a moment where Eric cuts through one foe’s mouth with his sword.

It all comically plays up against the notion that opera singers are louder than frequent gunfire, sure, but once you get past that, it’s easily the best moment in the movie.

+ The film effectively pulls a Show, Don’t Tell with Eric and Shelley’s relationship. We aren’t just told these two are in love and expected to buy it, we actually see them meet, and we witness their bond grow. We are there for virtually every moment of their burgeoning love, and we see why Eric would feel the way he does and why he would do what he does for Shelley.

Additionally, there is a moment where Eric’s faith in Shelley wanes, and he temporarily loses his powers as The Crow, and this makes sense, too, given what the movie shows us. I won’t go into it so as to avoid spoilers, but again, we are getting to see why his feelings momentarily change and how it affects him as the titular hero! So for some effective showing instead of telling, the film gets an Up! 

– There is some truly insipid dialogue in The Crow 2024. Just… woefully written stuff. Probably nothing worse than Shelley’s delivery of “If I’m ever hard to love, promise you will love me harder”, but it’s poor all over the script. It WANTS to capture that emo and angsty tone of the original Crow, but it comes across as so forced and impotent.

FKA Twigs plays Shelley and Bill Skarsgard plays Eric. And while I like Skarsgard as a physical actor who has some real talent, neither of them is capable enough to sell some of the terrible lines put in their mouths by the screenwriters. 

– When Eric finally murders his way to Danny Huston, we are treated to one of the weakest climaxes in recent memory. Huston’s character’s backstory suddenly goes out the window, and everything we’ve been told about him apparently doesn’t matter, as the immortal guy who has a deal with the devil to avoid going to hell just gets… dragged off to hell. It’s nonsensical, and the final battle leading up to the silly resolution isn’t nearly good enough to compensate for that. 

OVERALL

Look, I may not be bound by loyalty to the 1994 The Crow, but I still know bad movies when I see them. And The Crow 2024 is a bad movie. Not as bad as I had heard! No, I have about a dozen movies this year I have seen that are worse than this. But it’s still not very good. The dialogue is abysmal. The climax is an enormous disappointment. And most everything else is just relatively underwhelming. So if you love The Crow 1994, this may be the worst thing that can happen to you. But even if you don’t, this is still a pretty bad movie. 

2.0 out of 5