'The Crow' (2024)... let's not

To nobody’s surprise, The Crow (2024) was bad, like awful. Recently, I’ve been trying to be more optimistic when it comes to movies, trying to give these movies the benefit of the doubt after a terrible trailer. I never want to go into something and hate it, but this was one of the worst movies I’ve seen this year.

Credit: Lionsgate (2024)

Before I get irrationally angry about this movie again, I’m going to talk about that scene. This movie’s saving grace, which is generous to even call it that. If you know, you know, but there is one sequence in the final act of this movie that was kind of, almost cool. This scene perfectly represents everything that this movie was to me; it was something that had a good story lying beneath it but has been completely ruined in almost every aspect. As of writing this, I haven’t seen the original cult classic, but from seeing the remake, you can tell that it’s a sloppy retelling of a once-great story.

Kit Lazer’s Letterboxd review for this movie gives great insight into where this movie goes wrong, especially regarding the original film. It reads:

“Okay, let’s talk about what this movie doesn’t understand about THE CROW. 

The author of the graphic novel, James O’Barr, wrote the book in his grief when his girlfriend was killed by a drunk driver. He blamed himself because he didn’t have car insurance and he had called her to come pick him up.

There is no big bad. Eric and Shelley are murdered in cold blood by scum, at random. Their happiest moment is cut short for no reason other than that life sucks sometimes and some people are unimaginably awful.

It’s not a story about vengeance, not really, and it’s certainly not one about self-sacrifice. It’s a fantasy about being able to right a wrong, a fantasy where scum get what they deserve. It’s the desperate plea of a man in unimaginable pain learning to forgive himself”

Watching The Crow (2024) felt like watching a corpse, it was lifeless and felt almost offensive to be watching, there are points where this movie feels like it’s spitting on the original’s grave. With a small amount of media literacy, you can grasp what the core themes of the original story were supposed to be, but the remake does nothing to explore them. Instead of exploring themes of self-sacrifice and grief, the remake favours vengeance. This maybe could have worked if this movie was an original story, but it completely contradicts the context of the original.

Credit: Lionsgate (2024)

When I say that this movie is dark, I’m not just talking about the violence or some of its themes. A good 50% of this movie is lit so poorly that you can hardly see a thing. I love a good dark colour pallet in a comic book movie, don’t get me wrong, but this is truly an achievement in terrible lighting. Lighting is such a trivial thing to bitch about, and I know I don’t have the best eyesight in the world, but best believe you need to be eating those carrots to even stand a chance at being able to see some of this thing.

This movie has the second-most eye-rolling screenplay of the entire year. Off the top of my head, I would put this in the bottom five screenplays of the decade so far. I not-so-jokingly wrote in my Letterboxd review that “this movie reads like My Chemical Romance fan-fiction”, and upon further reflection, I would like to offer my most sincere apologies to the MCR fan fiction community. Your writing capabilities exceed those of whoever is responsible for this script. The Crow (2024) embodies the quote, “I’m fourteen, and this is deep”, which is even funnier when you realise that this film was smacked with an 18+ rating. I can’t think of any adults who wouldn’t be rolling their eyes at this screenplay.

The writing is so abysmal that I’m unsure if I can blame the terrible performances on the actors. It’s eradicated any possibility of even the greatest of actors being able to “do what they can” with what they were given. I’ve loved FKA Twigs for years, and I did not think it was possible to not like any of her work, but I felt bad for her when watching this. From the press interviews I’ve seen of her for this movie, she seemed genuinely excited for her first big role. It’s such a shame that it turned out this way for her and for everybody else who was excited to be involved in this project. The Crow (2024) should not exist, and it reflects a much wider issue in Hollywood. We don’t want or need every single movie to be remade; we want original ideas. This movie serves as an unwanted reminder that creativity is on the brink of death when it comes to mainstream movies. No wonder general audiences don’t want to spend their hard-earned money on going to the cinema when Hollywood is pumping out garbage like this.

My Rating: ✨

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