What Are You Watching

[Solitaire1]

Naruto, Episode 33: Battle Formation: Ino-Shika-Cho!!

[Rumpelteazer]

I went to see the new The Crow on Thursday.

Was it better than I thought? Yes, but that isn't saying much. Because it wasn't that good.

It's true that it isn't a remake of the Brandon Lee movie, but it was said it would be "a modern re-imagining of the graphic novel" and would stay close to the graphic novel. Which isn't true, I think. It's been a long time since I've read the graphic novel to be honest.

What I did like was the concept of the story. It isn't a drug gang Eric (no crow inspired last name this time) is fighting. But the boss of a Big Evil Corporation, much more up to date. Of course his name is Roeg, pronounced as Rogue. The himself also has some magic powers, but only a very short explanation about how/what is given.

Which brings me to my biggest gripe. About half of the 1 hour and 50 minutes of the movie was dedicated to Eric and Shelly falling in love/lust. It slowed the movie down to a crawl and it left no time for, IMHO, more interesting things. I would have loved more lore on the Big Bad Boss. I would also have appreciated more about his connection to Shelly. The characterization of the boss is as flat as a pancake. You know he's the boss and has powers, but that's it. Granted, Michael Wincott as Top Dollar is a hard act to follow, but it feels like they didn't even try. The henchman are even worse.

Eric and Shelly aren't very rounded characters either. At the start of the movie we get a flashback to something that happened to Eric when he was a kid, but it feels like it has very little bearing on the story, besides introducing crows as a theme. We get a couple of short flashbacks of Shelly's life, but those are too short to tell the viewer anything. I guess it's to show that the character are very much living in the here and now. Which is ironic, since it's the past that's catching up with them.

There is one big fight in this movie. Where Eric uses a sword to fight his way through even more henchmen. This fight was heavily inspired by the John Wick movies. And that scene in Kill Bill Vol. 1 where The Bride goes after O-Ren Ishii and first have to fight her way through the Crazy 88.

There is no big boss fight. There's a confrontation between Eric and Big Boss, but it's rather underwhelming.

The ending I'm ambiguous about. On the one hand I like it's different from the originals. On the other hand that isn't the lore. Crow lore is that the people who love each other are reunited in death.

Spoiler:

They have changed that to that Eric can bring him and Shelly back from the dead and then a twist is thrown in

The Brandon Lee movie had a great soundtrack. This new movie didn't even try. The combination of the music, set design, costumes/make up and the setting of the 1994 movie captured the early 1990s perfectly. With this "re-imagining" they mostly tried with setting, costumes and make up (Eric much critiqued patchwork tattoos), but somehow, to me, that doesn't work as well as the original did. But whether or not it captured the time is difficult to tell now, it's easier to do so in a couple of years.

Overall I found it boring. Mostly due to the long introduction of Eric and Shelly and the faceless villains. For an action movie it had surprisingly little action.

If you really want to watch it I would recommend waiting until it's on one of your streaming services. I wouldn't pay money for it to go see it in the cinema or rent it online.