Tag Archives: James O’Barr

Review: The Crow (dir. by Rupert Sanders)

Posted on by Arleigh

“When someone you love dies, you will know emptiness… You will never forget, and you will never, ever forgive.” — Eric Draven

The Crow is a remake built around a reasonable idea—returning to James O’Barr’s graphic novel rather than photocopying Alex Proyas’s 1994 cult film—but Rupert Sanders’s 2024 version never discovers why this material matters beyond its tattoos, bruises, and black eyeliner. It arrived dead on arrival with critics and audiences alike, not simply because it was measured against a beloved predecessor, but because it offered so little of its own identity. The film is dour without being haunting, romantic without generating much chemistry, and violent without making its revenge feel especially cathartic.

Sanders’s film stars Bill Skarsgård as Eric and musician FKA twigs as Shelly, lovers brutally murdered after stumbling too close to the secrets of criminal impresario Vincent Roeg, played with sleek, vaguely supernatural menace by Danny Huston. Eric awakens in a liminal afterlife, is granted a path back to the living world, and returns armed with supernatural endurance and a need to avenge Shelly. The fundamentals are familiar: love is destroyed by violence, death cannot sever that love, and vengeance becomes a darkly mythic expression of grief. Yet The Crow continually confuses the bare outline of that story with the emotional force that made it endure.

The production’s troubled history almost feels encoded in the finished movie. A new Crow film spent more than a decade trapped in development hell, cycling through different studios, directors, screenplays, and potential stars. Relativity Pictures held the project for years; Sony eventually became involved; various versions had names such as Bradley Cooper, Luke Evans, Jack Huston, and Jason Momoa attached at different stages, alongside filmmakers including Stephen Norrington, F. Javier Gutiérrez, and Corin Hardy. The project repeatedly stalled under changing rights arrangements, creative disagreements, and the general instability that often turns a familiar title into an endlessly recycled pitch deck. A fresh production effort was announced in 2020, but the Sanders version did not actually begin shooting until 2022 in Prague.wikipedia+2

That prolonged development makes the final product feel less like a passionately argued reinterpretation than a compromise that survived by default. Every era of the project seems to have left a trace. There is a prestige-minded desire to make Eric and Shelly psychologically damaged and contemporary. There is a franchise-minded urge to expand the supernatural mythology. There is also a music-video impulse toward body art, club scenes, fashionable misery, and sharply composed violence. None of these ingredients are automatically bad. But Sanders never finds a way to make them cohere into a world as tactile, strange, or emotionally immediate as the one Alex Proyas created in 1994.

The suspicion around the remake was understandable from the beginning. Most people involved in the original film have either expressed mixed feelings or outright disapproval about revisiting the property. The 1994 The Crow is not merely another cult favorite awaiting intellectual-property renewal. It is permanently linked to Brandon Lee, who was killed in an on-set shooting accident during production. The completed film became a memorial as much as a comic-book adaptation, and its emotional impact cannot be separated from the knowledge of what happened to its star.

The strongest objections have come from James O’Barr and Alex Proyas. O’Barr, writer and artist of the original graphic novel, has questioned the need for a remake for years, once calling the idea of remaking a then-15-year-old film “kind of ridiculous.” Proyas, meanwhile, has been even more direct. He argued that The Crow was not simply a movie because Brandon Lee died making it, and that the 1994 film should remain part of Lee’s legacy. When the new film’s reception turned hostile, Proyas called it a “cynical cash-grab” and mocked the lack of financial reward supposedly waiting at the end of it. The tone of those comments may strike some people as harsh, but the remake never makes a convincing counterargument.

To be fair, Sanders does not ask Skarsgård to imitate Lee. That is one of the film’s better instincts. Skarsgård’s Eric is physically slight, heavily tattooed, insecure, and visibly wrecked by the life he has lived before death. He is not a supernatural rock-and-roll avenger in the same way Lee was. Instead, he resembles a wounded, emotionally arrested young man forced into a mythic role he does not fully understand. It is a potentially interesting angle, especially for a story about grief turning someone into a monster.

But the screenplay, credited to Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider, does not give that approach enough shape. Eric is vulnerable, then dreamy, then brutally efficient, then mournful again, depending on what the scene needs. The film treats emotional instability as character depth, but those are not the same thing. A character can be fractured, contradictory, and self-destructive while still possessing a recognizable inner life. Skarsgård does what he can with the material, bringing real physical discomfort and sadness to Eric, yet the movie seems more interested in how his pain photographs than what it reveals.

The same issue affects Shelly. FKA twigs has an immediately magnetic screen presence, and the film wisely spends much more time on Eric and Shelly before their deaths than the 1994 film did. In theory, that should be a major advantage. If the viewer sees the relationship develop, then Eric’s return from death should carry more emotional force. Instead, the early sections feel like a montage stretched into an act: rehab, drugs, late-night intimacy, mutual confessions, music, dancing, sex, and shared trauma. The movie repeatedly tells us that these two are soulmates, but it rarely gives them the specific dialogue, humor, disagreements, or small gestures that make a romance believable.

Their relationship becomes a collection of poses. The camera understands that they are beautiful, sad, damaged people; the script never quite proves they are deeply connected individuals. That is fatal in The Crow, because Eric’s entire mission depends on the audience accepting that Shelly is not merely the woman he loved but the person who made life worth returning to. The movie substitutes trauma bonding for intimacy, assuming that shared wounds automatically equal love.

Huston’s Vincent Roeg is similarly underwritten. Roeg is introduced as an elegant criminal figure with occult powers, someone who preys on young women and sustains himself through a diabolical bargain. It is a significant departure from the relatively grounded gangland evil of the 1994 film, and it could have opened the door to something genuinely grotesque. Instead, the mythology grows more complicated while the villain becomes less interesting. Roeg speaks in the familiar language of immortal bad guys who are convinced that cruelty makes them profound. He lacks the memorable theatricality of the original film’s antagonists and the unnerving specificity that a character like this needs.

The remake’s expanded mythology is perhaps its biggest miscalculation. O’Barr’s original premise has always been powerful because it is so direct: a murdered man is allowed to return, guided by a crow, because love has been violently cut short. It is gothic, but it is simple. Sanders’s version adds a network of afterlife rules, soul exchanges, purgatorial spaces, and supernatural transactions. The more the film explains, the less mythical it feels. Grief does not become larger through lore. In this case, it becomes bogged down in mechanics.

Visually, Sanders has moments of genuine flair. The film’s strongest sequence comes late, when Eric tears through an opera house during a lavish performance. White costumes are stained red, the setting’s exaggerated grandeur clashes with Eric’s raw violence, and the action is staged with a sense of grotesque spectacle. It is the one scene where Sanders’s instincts as a visual stylist really connect with the source material’s heightened pulp melodrama. The sequence is bloody, theatrical, and almost absurd enough to become exhilarating.

Yet it arrives too late and feels disconnected from much of what precedes it. For large stretches, The Crow is subdued to the point of visual anonymity. Its darkness looks digitally smoothed rather than dreamlike. Its city does not have a personality. Its criminal underworld feels interchangeable with any number of slick streaming thrillers. The 1994 film’s Detroit-like nightmare city was impossible to separate from its mood: rain-slicked streets, scorched interiors, industrial rot, grotesque criminals, and an unforgettable goth-grunge soundtrack all fused into one singular aesthetic. Sanders’s movie has better technology but far less texture.

The soundtrack, in particular, exposes the remake’s uncertainty. The 1994 Crow became inseparable from its music, which drew together alternative rock, industrial, metal, and goth influences into an extension of Eric’s world. The 2024 version clearly wants to speak to a newer generation through contemporary pop, electronic, and melancholy club sensibilities. There is nothing wrong with modernizing the musical language, but the choices do not build a coherent subculture around the film. They play as individual selections rather than part of a living, breathing atmosphere.

This is why the remake’s negative response was so predictable. It was not doomed merely because it remade a movie people love, nor because any new Eric Draven would inevitably be compared to Brandon Lee. A remake could have justified itself by drawing more deeply from O’Barr’s graphic novel, creating a truly different visual language, or foregrounding the grief at the center of the story with more honesty. Sanders instead gives us a film that is constantly signaling pain while remaining emotionally remote.

There are fragments of a better Crow scattered throughout: Skarsgård’s willingness to play Eric as fragile and unglamorous, twigs’s spectral intensity, and the opera-house massacre’s gleefully excessive bloodshed. But those fragments never combine into a whole. The Crow has the eyeliner, the tattoos, the wounds, and the bird, but it never finds the heart beneath them. The original film endured because it turned loss into a piece of feverish gothic pulp. This remake turns loss into an aesthetic, and that is not nearly enough.

Review: The Crow (dir. by Alex Proyas)

Posted on by Arleigh

“If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever.” — Sarah Mohr

The Crow is one of those films whose reputation has become inseparable from the tragedy surrounding it, yet reducing it to that tragedy misses why it has endured so powerfully. Alex Proyas’s 1994 adaptation of James O’Barr’s graphic novel is a revenge story, a gothic romance, a comic-book nightmare, and an MTV-era industrial-rock mood piece fused into something singular. It is not flawless, and its storytelling is often more archetypal than psychologically deep, but that directness helps its emotional force. The movie does not ask viewers to untangle a complicated moral puzzle. It asks them to feel the enormity of a love violently interrupted, and then to watch that grief return from the grave with black feathers, white face paint, and a very personal sense of justice.

The premise is almost mythically simple. On the night before their wedding, musician Eric Draven and his fiancée Shelly Webster are murdered by a gang of thugs who break into their Detroit apartment. A year later, on Devil’s Night—the annual pre-Halloween ritual of fires and chaos that hangs over the film’s ruined cityscape—Eric rises from his grave, guided by a crow, to hunt down every person responsible. The classic revenge-movie structure is there: identify the killers, stalk them, punish them, move closer to the figure at the top. But The Crow distinguishes itself by making revenge feel less like triumphant macho fantasy and more like an extension of mourning. Eric does not become a cool killer because pain has made him stronger. He becomes an avenging specter because he cannot accept a world in which Shelly’s final moments are left unanswered.

Proyas directs the film like a fever dream built from wet asphalt, broken glass, empty tenements, and perpetual night. The Detroit of The Crow barely operates as a realistic city, but realism is not the point. It is an expressionist landscape, a metropolis that seems permanently trapped between a crime scene and a graveyard. The production design gives the movie its extraordinary visual identity: towering shadows, alleyways lit by flame, apartments that look like mausoleums, and a skyline that appears to have been abandoned by daylight itself. This is Gothic cinema filtered through comic-book panels, German Expressionism, punk fashion, and the darkly romantic visual language of early-1990s alternative music videos. It has been imitated constantly, sometimes lovingly and sometimes clumsily, but the original still feels unusually tactile. The grime, rain, fire, and shattered architecture have physical weight.

That sense of atmosphere is helped enormously by the soundtrack, which operates as more than a collection of era-specific needle drops. Songs by The Cure, Nine Inch Nails, Stone Temple Pilots, Pantera, and others create a sonic environment around Eric’s grief. The music gives the movie a pulse that is melancholy, furious, and seductive all at once. For many viewers, The Crow became a gateway text for a specific kind of 1990s gothic-alt identity: black clothing, industrial textures, romantic despair, and the conviction that heartbreak could be transformed into style without becoming trivial. Its aesthetic influence is obvious, but it worked because it was attached to an actual emotional core rather than simply a pile of cool images.

Brandon Lee is the center of that emotional core. His Eric Draven is handsome and charismatic, obviously, but the performance’s real strength lies in its shifts of tone. Lee can play Eric as tender and playful in the brief memories of his life with Shelly, then turn him into a creature of eerie stillness and explosive violence. He delivers some of the film’s most famous lines with a theatrical flair that could have become silly in another actor’s hands, but he never entirely loses the sense that Eric is broken underneath the black leather and corpse-like makeup. When he says, “It can’t rain all the time,” it does not land merely as a quotable gothic slogan. It is a declaration of faith from someone trying to recover one small piece of warmth from an overwhelmingly cruel world.

Lee’s death during production makes that performance almost unbearably charged. He was accidentally shot on set during the filming of a scene involving a prop firearm and died at age 28. The production had to regroup, rewrite and restructure parts of the film, and use a combination of body doubles, careful editing, visual effects, and previously filmed material to complete Eric’s story. That practical disruption is visible only in limited ways in the finished product; remarkably, The Crow generally feels cohesive rather than patched together. Still, the tragedy affected more than the logistics of production. It fundamentally changed the public’s relationship to the film. Eric’s resurrection, his grief over a stolen future, and the repeated imagery of a dead young man returning to finish unfinished business all acquired a terrible real-world resonance.

That connection could easily have overwhelmed the movie, turning it into a morbid curiosity. Instead, it made the film feel elegiac. Audiences did not merely see a fictional tragic hero; they saw Lee’s final completed role, an image of an actor whose life had ended before the public had a chance to see where his career might go. The contrast is particularly painful because Lee’s work here suggests enormous range and movie-star potential. He is not just doing martial-arts action or inheriting the legacy of his father, Bruce Lee. He is creating an icon of romantic anguish and dark humor. The public reception of The Crow therefore carried an unusual mixture of admiration, grief, and protectiveness. Its cult status was built partly on its style, soundtrack, and comic-book mythology, but also on the feeling that viewers were witnessing a final gift from an artist taken much too soon.

The supporting cast gives the film much of its flavor, especially because Proyas treats its villains as grotesque figures in a corrupted fairy tale. David Patrick Kelly’s T-Bird is nervy and cruel, Michael Massee’s Funboy has a sleazy unpredictability, and Angel David’s Skank brings a wild, cartoonish energy to the gang. Rochelle Davis, playing Sarah, provides something vital in the opposite direction. She is not merely a child sidekick; she represents the lingering human connection between Eric’s former life and his revenant existence. Her scenes with Eric remind us that he is not simply a supernatural executioner. He is still someone capable of care, humor, and memory.

But Michael Wincott’s Top Dollar is the film’s true villainous masterstroke. Wincott has one of cinema’s most instantly recognizable voices: smoky, velvety, sardonic, and faintly predatory. As Top Dollar, he makes every line sound like it has been exhaled through cigarette smoke in a cathedral. He is not a conventional crime boss in the realistic, procedural sense. He is a decadent king of the city’s underworld, a man who appears to have converted criminal power into a private religion of violence, ritual, and spectacle. His lair, his manner, and his relationship with his half-sister Myca all push him beyond ordinary gangster territory into something operatic and mythic.

What makes Wincott mesmerizing is that he does not overplay Top Dollar’s eccentricities. The character has plenty of theatrical material to work with—occult touches, ominous speeches, a penthouse filled with weaponry and strange décor—but Wincott approaches him with a serene confidence. He rarely seems rushed or rattled, even as Eric systematically destroys his organization. That calm makes him more intimidating. Top Dollar understands the city as a machine of corruption, and he sees himself as the person with his hands on the controls. Wincott’s performance gives the villain intelligence, sensuality, and a distinctly sinister elegance. He is evil, certainly, but he is never bland. In a movie full of striking images, his voice alone becomes part of the visual texture.

The action in The Crow is effective precisely because it avoids pretending that Eric’s vengeance is a balanced fight. For much of the movie, he is invulnerable, and the violence plays like supernatural punishment. The standout set pieces—Eric’s assault on the gang’s hideout, his confrontation with T-Bird, and the final tower sequence—have the heightened, almost ritualistic quality of comic-book action rather than the grounded impact of a crime thriller. That can make some of the antagonists feel less like people than targets, but again, the film is working in the language of myth. Eric is a ghost walking through the consequences of someone else’s cruelty.

If The Crow has a weakness, it is that the love story depends heavily on fragments. Shelly is more an emotional presence than a fully developed character, preserved in Eric’s memories as warmth, laughter, music, and suffering. Yet the film understands that grief often works that way. We do not always remember a person as a complete biography when they are gone; sometimes we cling to specific gestures, rooms, jokes, songs, and images. The flashes of Eric and Shelly together are deliberately idealized because they are being recalled by a man who has lost everything. The movie’s romanticism may be blunt, but it is sincere.

More than three decades later, The Crow still works because it is a film of conviction. It believes in the visual poetry of rain and ruins, in the melodrama of eternal love, in the power of a memorable face framed in black-and-white makeup, and in the possibility that a soundtrack can become part of a movie’s mythology. Brandon Lee’s death will always remain a heartbreaking part of its history, and it is impossible to watch the film without feeling that absence hovering around it. But The Crow is not remembered simply because of what happened behind the scenes. It is remembered because Proyas, Lee, Wincott, and the rest of the cast made a pulpy revenge tale feel like a dark romantic elegy—one that still takes flight every time the crow returns to the skyline.