‘The Crow’ (2024) movie review: Prague-shot reboot has great visuals, but never takes flight

A psychiatric patient rises from the dead to avenge his dead lover in The Crow, a reimagining of the James O’Barr graphic novel that inspired the 1994 cult classic starring Brandon Lee. Two years after filming in Prague during the summer of 2022, this reboot hits Czech cinemas this weekend after debuting to tragic reviews and a pitiful box office performance in the States last week.

That’s too bad, as there’s a lot to like in 2024’s The Crow, which boasts some flashy visuals from director Rupert Sanders and cinematographer Steve Annis, great location work at some of Prague’s lesser-utilized filming locations, a pair of engaging performances from Bill Skarsgård and FKA twigs, and a diverting emo-rap aesthetic that contrasts with the original’s certified goth look.

But the 2024 The Crow also completely fumbles its core narrative, which makes any defense of the final film quite difficult. What should be a straightforward tale of vengeance, as conceived in every previous version of this story (the earlier film spawned three sequels and a TV series) is instead frankensteined into something quite different by a screenplay credited to Zach Baylin and William Josef Schneider. No, this isn’t a story about revenge. It’s about love, and all the blood that must be spilt because of it.

Skarsgård stars as Eric Draven, who, we infer through fractured flashbacks, burned down his childhood home after his horse got mangled in a barbed wire fence. He loved that horse, you see, and had to lash out at the world… but not out of hate, out of love. And so Eric, apparently, spends the next couple decades in a futuristic psych ward (nicely played by the Cultural Centre Repre in Most), where he’s bullied by the other inmates, perhaps due to the Caesar mullet and multiple poor-choice tattoos (including a prominent cursive “lullaby” over an eyebrow) he’s acquired over the years.

But love comes walking into Eric’s life once again in the form of Shelly (FKA Twigs), who strolls into the psych ward after being busted for drugs (at Prague’s Florenc metro station, most appropriately). The two form an unlikely bond before the goons out to kill her swing by, and the pair slip out the laundry room. “I’m rehabilitated,” Draven declares as he cuts off his ankle monitor.

Had The Crow gone all-in on the meth-fueled trash romance that dominates the first half of the movie, this might have been something special. Skarsgård and FKA Twigs are both wholly convincing in these roles, and their funky chemistry wafts through the screen. Bolstered by first-rate character and costume design, the emo grunge world of 2024’s The Crow is ickily authentic, and like the goth landscape of the 1994 film, a product of the here-and-now. In 30 years, viewers watching this movie will have an accurate representation of the kind of 2020s subculture dominated by the likes of Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox.

Unfortunately, no one will be watching The Crow three decades from now for its story, which is an unmitigated disaster. It involves supernatural mafia boss Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), who keeps a cabal of young female pianists and whispers sweet nothings into their ears to turn them into murderous zombies. Zadie (Isabella Wei) has video evidence of Roeg’s misdoings, and puts a target on Shelly’s back after sending it to her. Nevermind that this video now exists on the cloud; no, Roeg must have each device it was sent to, trusting that nobody uploaded it to YouTube.

This is The Crow, so we know what happens from here: Roeg’s goons kill both Shelly and Eric, and Draven is resurrected from the grave as the unkillable titular superhero to enact revenge. Right? Right? Well, yes… but actually no.

In the most puzzling aspect of the 2024 version of The Crow, the movie manages to mangle this very simple revenge movie narrative by draining Draven of his motivation. After he wakes up in purgatory (played by the Žižkov Freight Railway Station), Kronos (Sami Bouajila) helpfully explains that not only will Eric be resurrected, but he can also bring Shelly back from the dead by killing those responsible for her murder. Oh, what luck. He probably wanted to kill those guys anyway.

And so Eric, no longer motivated by vengeance but by a desire to save his true love, goes on a murderous rampage to bring her back. He now has Deadpool & Wolverine-like healing powers, but he’s still a tweaker weakling; early scenes of him struggling to sink a knife into low-level goons are subversively amusing. But by the bravura climax at Prague’s Rudolfinum concert hall, as Draven works his way up the stairs towards Roeg’s top dogs, played by Laura Birn and Czech actor Karel Dobrý, he’s become an improbable martial arts master.

The opera house sequence is as well-staged and shot as anything in the John Wick movies, and stands on its own as a piece of top-tier action filmmaking. But there’s nothing interesting, thematically, in watching Draven do what he does in this version of the movie. Now he’s only an antihero in appearance; his motivation is thoroughly righteous.

O’Barr wrote the graphic novel The Crow after a drunk driver killed his fiancée, as a way of processing his grief. Stories of revenge help us deal with trauma, by externalizing our inner turmoil. There’s a version of 2024’s The Crow that understands that, in depicting a young Draven burning his house down. But by the end of the movie, he is less O’Barr’s superhero and more a Super Mario, out to save his princess by slashing through all the goombahs that get in his way.