The first thing you see in the reimagined “The Crow” is a white horse fallen in a muddy field, badly bloodied after getting tangled in barbed wire. It’s a metaphor, of course, and a clumsy one at that — a powerful image that doesn’t really fit well and is never explained.
This is a sign that director Rupert Sanders has always tended to choose the stylish option over the honest one in this film. In his attempt to give new life to the cult hero of comics and film, he has given us a lot of beauty at the expense of depth or coherence.
The filmmakers have set their story in modern, normal Europe and made it clear that the film is based on James O’Barr’s graphic novel, but the 1994 film adaptation, starring Brandon Lee, looms over it like a stubborn crow.
Brandon, the son of legendary actor and martial artist Bruce Lee, was just 28 years old when he died after being shot while filming a scene for “The Crow.” History always seems to repeat itself: A new adaptation comes out just as another on-set death makes headlines.
Lee’s “The Crow” was completed without him, and he never got to see it etched into the memories of Gen X with the rain-drenched, gothic splendor that influenced everything from alternative fashion to “Blade” and Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy.
Bill Skarsgård plays Lee as Eric Draven, a man so in love that he returns from the dead to avenge his and his girlfriend’s murders in what could be described as a sort of supernatural, romantic murder spree.
William Schneider, who wrote the screenplay with Jack Belin, has given the story an almost operatic form, involving a devil, a Faustian bargain, blood-worship vows and a divine guide who oversees the area between heaven and hell that resembles a disused, weed-covered railway station. Our hero is told, “Kill those who killed you and you’ll get it back.”
The first half moves slowly, setting the stage for the steady beat of limbs and necks being severed at the end. Eric and his love, Shelly, meet in a rehabilitation prison for wayward youths that’s so well-lit and furnished it looks like an airport lounge where cappuccinos go for $19 but the Wi-Fi is free.
Eric is a gentle loner – tormented by a past the author doesn’t bother to fill in, who likes to draw in the book and has a lot of tattoos. His apartment is lined with mannequins with their heads covered in plastic and his new love calls him “brilliantly broken.” He’s like a Blink-182 song come to life.
Shelly is more complex, but that’s probably because the writers refused to give her a real backstory. She has a tattoo that says “Laugh now, cry later”, she reads serious literature and likes to dance in her underwear. She clearly comes from a wealthy family and has a falling out with her mother, but she also did an unimaginably horrible thing, which the audience will learn about at the end.
Part of the trouble is that the main couple exudes very little power, leading to a romance that’s more teen-age than fully fleshed out. And this is a story that needs a love capable of transcending death.
There are several great sequences — mostly featuring Skarsgard in a trench coat, wandering around a desolate concrete jungle in the rain at night — until “The Crow” gets down to one of this year’s better action sequences, as though it’s one of those heightened performances that take place at an opera.
By this time Eric has donned heavy eye and cheek makeup, just like the Crow. He adds a katana and an inability to die to this outfit. As he gets closer to his target, mowing down tuxedoed bad guys, as the arias progress, the group’s actions on stage echo the raging battle backstage. A few severed heads could be considered exaggeration at the curtain call, but subtlety is not being appreciated here.
If the original film was light on plot but visually good, the new film has a better story but lacks the ideas of the previous films, stealing bits and pieces from “The Matrix”, “Joker” and “Kill Bill”. So why not make something completely new?
“The Crow” isn’t bad — and it gets better as it goes on — but it’s silly. It can’t escape Lee and the original 1994 film, even if it builds more metaphorical scaffolding for the smartphone generation. To use the earliest metaphor, it’s like a stranded white horse — tied down to its traumatic past, never free to gallop on its own.
Lionsgate’s “The Crow,” which hits theaters Friday, is rated R for “strong bloody violence, gore, language, sexuality/nudity and drug use.” Duration: 111 minutes. Two-and-a-half stars out of four.
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