When it comes to movie reviews on new releases, I don’t always have complete control over what I get to see.
Mostly it’s to see if my critiques fall in line with national commentators or not – more often than not, my opinion is different!
And in some instances when the movies are panned worldwide, it feels like I’ll never get those hours spent in the theater back.
Such has been the case with a handful of flicks this year.
The Crow reboot took a pop culture favorite storyline and ruined it in my book.
After all, the 1994 original was a cult masterpiece and Brandon Lee’s final silver screen role – something that is impossible to beat.
While its beautifully shot and most of the soundtrack is on point for the overall theme at hand this Crow needed a better storyline.
I’ll also give kudos to the villain in this one – he’s much scarier than the original!
The Crow is an American gothic superhero film directed by Rupert Sanders from a screenplay by Zach Baylin and William Schneider.
As a reboot of The Crow film series, it is the fifth film in the franchise, and is the second film, after the 1994 film, to adapt the 1989 comic book series by James O’Barr.
The film stars Bill Skarsgård, FKA Twigs, Danny Huston, Josette Simon, Laura Birn, Sami Bouajila, Isabella Wei, Sebastian Orozco, and Jordan Bolger.
The Crow is rated R for strong bloody violence, gore, language, sexuality/nudity, and drug use and is 111 minutes long.
Musician Shelly (Twigs) gets a phone call from her distraught friend Zadie (Wei) about a video taken by their mutual friend Dorm (Orozco) with footage from an incident at a party they attended.
The video implicates Shelly’s quasi-boss Vincent Roeg (Huston) and his supernatural ability to influence people.
At the time, Shelly is afraid of Roeg and what the video could do to her friends, so, she hides her copy of the video and heads out of her apartment to find some safe haven from Roeg’s henchmen.
She literally runs into a pair of cops and gets picked up for possession of drugs then sent to a rehabilitation center.
That’s where Shelly meets and befriends Eric (Skarsgård), a young man with a troubled childhood and drug addiction.
When Roeg’s right hand Marion (Birn), arrives at the institution looking for Shelly with the musician’s mother Sophia (Simon) in tow – both Eric and Shelly escape together.
Eric and Shelly end up falling in love while bonding over their shared love of music and drugs.
One night, however, Roeg’s men end up finding them and murder them both.
In the afterlife, Eric wakes up in an abandoned trainyard where the spirit guide Kronos (Bouajila) explains that he will have to kill Roeg in exchange for getting Shelly back.
Kronos adds that Roeg has upset the balance of good and evil on Earth and that Eric’s love for Shelly must remain “pure.”
Eric is then revived and assisted by a crow to hunt down and start killing Roeg’s men.
Unfortunately, he later discovers the video footage of Roeg taking possession of Shelly’s mind to force her to kill another woman.
This ends up causing Eric to doubt his love for Shelly to the point that he is critically injured and dies again.
From there things get predictably more intense and gruesome as Eric takes his revenge but, I found the overall ending lackluster.
Besides that, all I can say is that you won’t be missing much if you skip this flick.
