This long-awaited new version of the original graphic novel has a character all its own. It is best enjoyed if you can put Brandon Lee and his gothic fantasies aside for two hours.
Why Bill Skarsgård Says The Crow Was Worth a Reinterpretation (Exclusive)
Lionsgate was keen that the latest incarnation of “The Crow” not be labeled a remake or a reboot, though in resurrecting a dormant film franchise, it does qualify as the latter. Indeed, it is not a remake, even though the script this time around takes even greater liberties with the source material of J. O’Barr’s original comics than did its 1994 film adaptation. That film is burned into the collective consciousness largely because Brandon Lee died in an on-set accident during its making, instituting a career breakthrough that would have been poetically morbid even without the stigma of actual tragedy.
Comparisons born of sentimental favoritism are rarely flattering, so it’s understandable that the studio would want to banish them as far as possible. It was already going to be an uphill battle for a long-gestating project that’s cycled through countless directors, writers and stars over the past decade to get to this final product, with some loyal fans and early reviewers sharpening their knives for the coup de grace. But if you can forget about “Crows” that came before it, “Snow White and the Huntsman” director Rupert Sanders’s film works to a considerable extent on its own — as a dreamy fantasy thriller that’s bloody but oddly inviting.
The pace is slower than most popcorn entertainments of today, and the tone is less superheroic, pop-Gothic, or martial-arts than viewers of earlier films might expect. The contrastingly elegant but dislocated revenge-slash-love story of this reinvention is no slam dunk. But it’s also no unwatchable failure.
