I genuinely hate how many times I’ve had to say this, and it’s never a statement I make lightly, but this movie should not exist.

Ever since the Alex Proyas film in 1994, there have been no less than three failed cinematic attempts and one failed TV series to try and keep the Crow franchise going. Thirty godforsaken years of trying to recapture that lightning. And this one movie took up half that time, with countless writers, directors, and actors all trying and suffering for over fifteen fucking years to get this movie off the ground.

And who was the director to finally get it done? Goddamn Rupert Sanders. The guy who cheated on his supermodel wife to fuck his leading actress on the set of his debut feature. And for an encore, he cast Scarlett Johansson to play a Japanese character. And both movies were forgettable mediocrities at best. The Crow (2024) had damn well better be the movie to finally kill his career for good and all, because we as a society are all worse off as long as Rupert Sanders keeps getting work in Hollywood.

The basic premise is the same. Eric (Bill Skarsgaard) and his girlfriend (Shelly, played by FKA Twigs) are brutally slain in their home. And because this pure and beautiful everlasting love was cut short by such a cruel and monstrous act of slaughter, a crow brings Eric back to life as an invulnerable killing machine to complete his unfinished business and destroy his killers before laying himself to rest.

The original film more or less picked up with Eric and Shelly already dead. With the remake, they’re not killed until roughly halfway in. Moreover, while the late Brandon Lee’s Eric was only immortal while his crow familiar lived, the Bill Skarsgaard portrayal is only as strong as his love for Shelly. So these filmmakers are putting all their effort into reframing the story as a gothic supernatural romance.

Not a bad idea. In all honesty, it might’ve worked. Too bad there are so many reasons why it doesn’t.

First of all, this approach means that the crow familiar is redundant. In fact, the character’s signature makeup and costume… really, everything about the character’s classic iconography feels arbitrarily tacked-on. Thus we have an origin story in which the origin makes no sense.

Speaking of nonsense, our villain (Vincent Roeg, played by Danny Huston) kills our two lovers because of an incriminating video on Shelly’s phone. I hasten to add that Vincent is an immortal crime lord who derives his wealth and power directly from Satan himself in exchange for sending innocent souls to Hell. Which brought me to the question of what could possibly be on the video that could threaten such a villain. Then we find out what’s on the video, and the plot makes even less sense.

Additionally, it was a rather important part of the original film that the villains were ordinary mortals. Larger than life figures who were unambiguously evil, sure, but nonetheless mortals faced with certain doom against an unstoppable undead killing machine. And the undead killing machine was the protagonist. This is what made the original film such a subversive work with a solid anti-hero. We lose that with a romantic lead who’s supposed to be unambiguously sympathetic versus a superpowered villain who’s unambiguously evil.

Of course, it also makes a huge difference that the original film was fun. The late Brandon Lee portrayed the Crow in a way that looked like fun. Hell, this remake owes a lot to Deadpool — another R-rated superhero action franchise with bloody action scenes and an invulnerable protagonist — and Deadpool’s whole deal is fun. Bill Skarsgaard’s portrayal is not fun. It’s po-faced pretentious edgelord pigshit that takes itself way, WAY too seriously to be fun.

Even the action scenes are tedious to sit through. The framing is poor, the choreography is lackluster, and Eric spends so much time racked with pain from his injuries that the pacing is FUBAR. The only decent action scene is the opera house sequence in the third act, the only one that builds on the premise into anything remotely comparable to the gory fast-paced off-the-wall excitement of Deadpool.

But let’s get back to the central love story. The premise does not work unless the Eric/Shelly relationship is such a transcendent romance between two such perfectly matched soul mates that the angels would weep to see them parted. The original film was smart enough to leave that to the audience’s imagination. The remake was brash enough to try and reach that impossibly high bar. With FKA Twigs, who doesn’t have anywhere near the charisma or the chemistry to pass muster as the romantic lead this movie needed.

Come to think of it, Eric and Shelly were the only two properly developed characters in this movie. Even Vincent falls short, because it’s never made clear what he’s doing with all his wealth and power or why his immortal life should continue. Aside from the two romantic leads, every single character only registers as a plot device. Sami Bouajila plays the worst case in point, guy’s a straight-up exposition machine.

As with Borderlands before it, The Crow (2024) is a boring, slipshod, tedious, uninspired, poorly-paced wreck that totally misses the point of the source material. Also like Borderlands, it’s a product of cowardice from studio executives too afraid to let the lead characters be unsympathetic. (Which is freaking hilarious, from the studio that proudly slaps “The studio behind John Wick” on every one of its posters and trailers.) The filmmakers show a surface-level understanding of how gothic imagery is central to the property, but they don’t understand how to make it look cathartic or fun.

This franchise needs to stay dead and buried. Rupert Sanders needs to be exiled from show business entirely. The entire Lionsgate C-suite needs to burn down. If that much isn’t accomplished, then this movie and its 15 years in development were all for nothing.