One of the first things you see in the reimagined “The Crow” is the sight of a fallen white horse in a muddy field, bleeding badly after becoming entangled in barbed wire. It’s a metaphor, of course, and a clunky one at that — a powerful image that doesn’t really fit well and is never explained.
That’s a hint that director Rupert Sanders will have a tendency to consistently pick 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’s given us plenty of beauty at the expense of depth or coherence.
The filmmakers have set their tale in a modern, generic Europe and made it very clear that this movie is based on the graphic novel by James O’Barr, but the 1994 film adaptation starring Brandon Lee hovers over it like, well, a stubborn crow.
Brandon, son of legendary actor and martial artist Bruce Lee, was just 28 when he died after being shot while filming a scene for “The Crow.” History seems always to repeat: The new adaptation lands as another on-set death remains in the headlines.
Lee’s “The Crow” was finished without him and he never got to see it enter Gen X memory in all its rain-drenched, gothic glory, influencing everything from alternative fashion to “Blade” to Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy.
Bill Skarsgård seizes Lee’s role of Eric Draven, a man so in love that he returns from the dead to revenge his and his sweetheart’s slayings in what can be best called a sort of supernatural, romantic murderfest. (The tagline, “True love never dies,” clumsily rips off Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera.”)
William Schneider, who co-wrote the screenplay with Zach Baylin, has given the story a near-operatic facelift, by introducing a devil, a Faustian bargain, blood-on-blood oaths and a godlike guide who monitors the limbo between heaven and hell, which looks like a disused, weed-covered railway station. “Kill the ones who killed you and you’ll get her back,” our hero is told.
The first half drags at it sets the table for the steady beat of limbs and necks being detached at the end. Eric and his love, Shelly (played by an uneven FKA Twigs), meet in a rehab prison for wayward youth that is so well lit and appointed that it looks more like an airport lounge where the cappuccinos are $19 but the Wi-Fi is complimentary.
Eric is a gentle loner — tortured by a past the writers don’t bother filling in, who likes to sketch in a book (universal cinema code signaling a sensitive soul) and is heavily tattooed (he’s often shirtless). His apartment has rows of mannequins with their heads covered in plastic and his new love calls him “brilliantly broken.” He’s like a Blink-182 lyric come to life.
Shelly is more complex, but that’s because the writers maybe gave up on giving her a real backstory. She has a tattoo that says “Laugh now, cry later,” reads serious literature and loves dancing in her underwear. She clearly comes from wealth and has had a falling out with her mom, but has also done an unimaginably horrible thing, which viewers will learn about at the end.
Part of the trouble is that the lead couple cast off very little electricity, offering a love affair that’s more teen-like than all-consuming. And this is a story that needs a love capable of transcending death.
There are lots of cool-looking moments — mostly Skarsgård in a trench coat, stomping around the desolate concrete jungle in the rain at night — until “The Crow” builds to one of the better action sequences this year, albeit another one of those heightened showdowns at the opera.
By this time, Eric has donned the Crow’s heavy eye and cheek makeup. He adds to this ensemble a katana and an inability to die. As he closes in on his target, mowing down tuxedoed bad guys as arias soar, the group movements on stage are echoed by the furious fighting backstage. A few severed heads might be considered over the top at curtain call, but subtlety isn’t being applauded here.
If the original was plot-light but visually delicious, the new one has a better story but suffers from ideas in the films built on its predecessor, stealing a little from “The Matrix,” “Joker” and “Kill Bill.” Why not create something entirely new?
“The Crow” isn’t bad — and it gets better as it goes — but it’s an exercise in folly. It cannot escape Lee and the 1994 original even as it builds a more allegorical scaffolding for the smartphone generation. To use that very first metaphor, it’s like the trapped white horse — held down by its own painful past, never free to gallop on its own.
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“The Crow,” a Lionsgate release that hits theaters Friday, is rated R for “strong bloody violence, gore, language, sexuality/nudity and drug use.” Running time: 111 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
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