[COLUMN] The Crow Might Be Bad, But At Least It's Sincere | by Darren Mooney

Oscar Wilde famously argued that “all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.” Rupert Sanders’ remake of The Crow is definitely bad poetry. It’s an awkward and ungainly film, a reboot of a comic book property that wasn’t so much dead on arrival as it was dead on announcement. It’s the very definition of an unnecessary brand extension, a rehash of a cult movie from the 1990s that has long been overshadowed by its own tragedy. However, there is a strange genuine feeling to it.

The Crow adapts the comic character created by writer and artist James O’Barr, first published in Caliber Presents in 1989. O’Barr was inspired by the loss of his fiancée Beverly, who died in an accident involving a drunk driver. "My life was changed instantly forever because I had, unhealthy or not, wrapped my whole existence around this person,” O'Barr recalls. “So I just sat down and began drawing something where I could get justice and peace on paper that I couldn't get in real life.”

O’Barr was eighteen years old when he lost Beverly, and he carried that pain around with him for at least a decade, until he eventually published The Crow. This is reflected in The Crow itself. The Crow is, at its core, a story about the idea of love as an eternal and all-consuming force, and the loss of that love as a tragedy on an elemental level that demands some form of cosmic or divine retribution to set things right. It is a fundamentally adolescent idea.

This adaptation of The Crow comes with the sort of lore that one expects from a modern mainstream comics adaptation. The plot is driven by the villainous Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), a man who has lived centuries through a sinister satanic pact. Roeg has the power to compel people with his voice. By guiding the virtuous to commit suicide, he provides hell with a steady stream of otherwise noble souls, which naturally command a higher value than those already sullied.

There are hints of contemporary relevance to this framing device. Just as the remote island where billionaires indulge their worst impulses in Blink Twice (originally titled Pussy Island) evokes the specter of Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, Roeg’s predation upon often young and often female victims, often with talent in the creative arts, cannot help but suggest Harvey Weinstein. Huston’s casting goes a long way; he is Hollywood royalty, the son of legendary director John Huston.

The Crow never delves too deeply into these themes, which is probably for the best. That would require a sort of grace that largely eludes the remake. Instead, the film invests considerable energy into developing the dynamic between its two leads. Shelly (FKA twigs) is one of Roeg’s victims, and has escaped with evidence of his crimes. She falls in love with Eric (Bill Skarsgård). However, Shelly cannot truly escape Roeg. His goons track down Shelly and Eric, murdering them in Eric’s loft.

On his way to the afterlife, Eric is intercepted by a mysterious spiritual guide (Sami Bouajila), who offers him a deal. If Eric returns to the land of the living and kills Roeg, restoring some vague balance between the forces of light and darkness, he will be reunited with Shelly. To facilitate his rip-roaring rampage of revenge, Eric will be granted immortality. There is only one caveat: he is unstoppable for only so long as his love for Shelly remains pure. If he doubts or questions that love, he dies.

The Crow is never a particularly elegant movie. It is not graceful or smooth. Its internal logic might charitably be described as “bumpy.” It is visually murky and unrefined, as one might expect from the director of movies like Snow White and the Huntsman and 2017’s Ghost in the Shell. Of course, these columns aren’t reviews, but it’s worth being clear. The Crow is an uneven mess of a movie. Still, the fact that The Crow is bad is the least interesting thing about this remake.

There is a minor wave of nostalgia for the 2000s sweeping through contemporary pop culture. The second biggest movie of the year, Deadpool and Wolverine, is a case in point. Deadpool and Wolverine sells itself as “a love letter” to the superhero movies of the 2000s. It is a starring vehicle for Hugh Jackman, who first played Wolverine in Bryan Singer’s X-Men in 2000. It includes cameos from various other characters from that film, like Sabretooth (Tyler Mane) and Toad (Ray Park).

Deadpool and Wolverine’s big second act finale features the return of two classic comic book characters from that era. Jennifer Garner reprises her role as Elektra, from 2003’s Daredevil and 2005’s Elektra. While Wesley Snipes first played Blade in 1998, the sequels came out in 2002 and 2004. Those millennial influences seep through the film in other ways. The movie’s opening credits are set to NSYNC’s Bye, Bye, Bye, a pop hit released January 2000.

Despite being an adaptation of a 1980s comic book and remake of a 1990s film, The Crow is similarly aesthetically anchored in the 2000s. It seems to have been shot entirely under fluorescent lighting. Its cast look like they have been costumed at Hot Topic, which enjoyed the peak of its pop cultural influence roughly between 2004 and 2008. There are moments when The Crow feels like a 111-minute Evanescence video. It pitches itself at the intersection of “goth” and “grunge.”

However, there is something different in how these two movies approach their nostalgia for the pop culture of two decades prior. Deadpool and Wolverine couches its references in winking irony and knowing sarcasm. Like so many blockbusters of the 2010s and the 2020s, Deadpool and Wolverine insists on positioning itself archly above the culture that it claims to love. There is a detached quality to Deadpool and Wolverine, a fear that any actual sincerity opens it up to mockery.

The Crow understands that sincerity is essential to the era that it seeks to evoke and the story that it wants to tell. The Crow is the fantasy of a teenage boy, and it leans into this. In this world, any love letter worth writing is printed on skin with a tattooist’s ink and the coolest apartments are decorated with mannequins under plastic sheets. Standing on a bridge, contemplating a jump into the cold water below, Shelly asks Eric, “Do you think angsty teens will build shrines to us?”

The Crow is a love story, spending a great deal of time on the romance between Shelly and Eric. There’s a strange and very juvenile quality to this. While on the run from Roeg, Shelly and Eric seem to frequent underground raves and take time out to attend music festivals. Shelly asks Eric to promise her one thing: “If I’m ever hard to love, try to love me harder.” This is the driving premise of The Crow: Eric loves Shelly so hard that he returns from the grave to avenge her.

In some cases, the film’s clumsiness becomes endearing. The Crow marks FKA twigs’ first leading role in a major motion picture. The performance isn’t exactly naturalistic or honed. twigs’ delivery can often seem a little stilted or awkward. To be fair, it’s not as if Shelly is an especially nuanced or complex character, and twigs doesn’t have a strong supporting cast around her to help shoulder the weight of the movie.

Still, there’s something strangely earnest and vulnerable in her performance. It’s not necessarily good in the traditional sense, in that there’s always a sense of watching a young performer figure out how to be the second lead of a blockbuster in real time. However, this becomes unusually compelling when approached on its own terms. Shelly does have an otherworldly quality to her, seemingly as adrift in the world as twigs is in the film.

The Crow is an unashamedly emo premise, and so that teenage sincerity is woven into the fabric of the story. Once resurrected, Eric is as functionally immortal as the two leads in Deadpool and Wolverine. However, the film places a strong emphasis on the notion of sensation and experience. Roeg luxuriates in the sound of music, its performance enriching his life. As Eric’s body tears itself apart and pulls itself back together, there’s a visceral and tangible quality to it.

Over the course of The Crow, bones break, blood pours and flesh tears. After one confrontation, Eric has to pop a ruptured intestine back into his body so it can heal. When Eric fires a gun inside a parked car, the sound almost deafens him. When he is impaled on a sword at the climax, Eric continues to fight, his whole body fashioned into a weapon. “You don’t feel anything, do you?” Roeg challenges Eric in their final confrontation. Eric replies, “I feel it all.”

It makes sense that the film’s big final act set piece finds Eric murdering his way through an opera house. This is the stuff of opera – be it traditional opera, soap opera or rock opera – with the most intense feeling rendered on the biggest canvas in the broadest manner possible. It doesn’t quite cohere. The notes are just a little bit off. However, it’s never ashamed or insecure. It never tries to be anything other than what it is. It never pretends to be more mature or sophisticated than it is.

This is the stuff of bad teenage poetry. Whatever else can be said about The Crow, it feels oddly genuine.