Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Crow’ on Starz, a Misbegotten Remake of a ‘90s Goth Cult Classic

Full disclosure: The 2024 remake of The Crow (now streaming on Starz) faced an uphill battle to impress me – and perhaps everyone else, considering its status as one of the year’s biggest box office flops. You likely know the story of the 1994 film, haunted by the ghost of Brandon Lee, who was killed during filming when a prop gun accidentally contained a live round, an incredibly creepy tragedy considering he was playing a bereaved man resurrected from the dead to get revenge against the evil SOBs who murdered his fiancee. The film, based on J.O. Barr’s comic book, was a medium-sized hit because the same 2,944 people saw it over and over and over again (guilty!); we loved it for its gloomy-goth Nine Inch Nails-video aesthetic, stylized violence, highly quotable dialogue (“It can’t rain all the time,” “FIRE IT UP! FIRE IT UP!”) and the kind of doomed romance that young people who live in college dormitories FEEL so very HARD. Everything about it screams DO NOT REMAKE THIS, EVER, but alas. After some crummy sequels, a short-lived TV series and a zillion years in development hell, such a misbegotten thing eventually emerged, directed by Rupert Sanders and starring Bill Skarsgard and FKA Twigs – and we are so very underwhelmed. 

THE CROW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open inside Eric Draven’s (Skarsgaard) bad dream, with a Highly Symbolic Horse tangled in barbed wire. You may hereby forget this Highly Symbolic symbolism, because it carries very little weight from here on out. Now, one way this Crow stands apart from the original is how it puts more effort into developing its lead characters – or at least trying to, as it has Eric and Shelly (FKA Twigs) meeting in a prison-like rehab center and escaping together to the sounds of doomed post-punk (specifically, Joy Division) so they may participate in montages where they take drugs and murk lurve and take sexy coed baths and jump on the bed in their underwear and generally look sculpted like Greek statues. This is the type of shit that tells us that their love is hot and fast and forever and after knowing each other for about three days they’re ready and willing to die for each other. 

Which sort of happens. Here’s how: There’s this evil emm-effer named Roeg (Danny Huston) who made a deal with the devil for immortality and, in order to hold up his end of the bargain, apparently (this is where it gets murky) must indirectly kill people by whispering sweet Satanic nothings in their ears until their eyes go milky and they jam daggers in their own carotid arteries. Shelly has a rather damning video of Roeg inflicting this nastiness on a poor sap, so she’s at the very tippy-top of his to-be-dead list. There is no plot twist here. One night, Eric and Shelly, wearing thrift-store shag-rug fur coats and military-surplus duds that surely required paying thousands and thousands to high-end designers to make their wearers look like exquisite dirtbags, come home to Eric’s art-directed-within-an-inch-of-its-life (read: cluttered with creepy mannequins covered with clear plastic sheets) warehouse loft and are ambushed by Roeg’s thugs. Plastic bags. Over their heads. Good night forever, sweet neo-goth prince and princess. See ya in the next one.

But. After some hacky underwater-sinking-with-sad-tendrils-of-moonlight-reaching-for-them imagery, Eric emerges from a puddle in an abandoned train depot, which is apparently what passes for urban-nightmare-hellhole purgatories these days, I guess. He meets Kronos (Sami Bouajila), a mysterious Purgatorian who tells him “The crow will guide you to make things right.” Eric returns to the land of the living – with a crow always overhead and observing – and figures out that he can take a bullet to the heart and a dagger to the liver and not die. It still hurts like hell, though, which is far from ideal, but you take what you can get in this sitch, I guess. So he pushes his intestines back into his abdomen in gruesome closeup and gets to revengin’. 

Now this is the point where I cease sharing details lest things get a mite spoliery, which is lucky for me, because I’ve failed to remember the whole chunk of the movie leading up to the Donning Of The Trenchcoat and application of smeared eyeliner to look like a sad weepy black metal guy. This occurs far too late in the movie, because the only thing I recall is thinking, this guy really needs a uniform, which is exactly what a good movie wouldn’t have you thinking at this point.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: I like some Skarsgaard stunt-casting – It, Atomic Blonde, Nosferatu – but Jebus help me, watching him don a bunch of ugly-ass face, neck and hand tattoos and mope around looking like he needs a shower and an old Steve Martin comedy made me think he was channeling Eric Draven through Pete Davidson.

Performance Worth Watching: This Crow is like The Batman meets The King of Staten Island. I apologize.

Memorable Dialogue: Roeg plunges a knife into Eric’s heart:

Roeg: You don’t feel anything, do you?

Eric: I feel it all.

Sex and Skin: Sarsgaard tush in the shower, and a medium-steamy schtup with Ms. Twigs.

Our Take: I recently rewatched ’94’s The Crow after a couple decades of dormancy in my mind, and was struck with how beautifully silly it all was – its tongue-in-cheekiness overshadowed by Lee’s death, it strikes a distinctively strange tone, and is, wholly by design, as thin and pulpy as its comic-book origin. The soundtrack (NIN, the Cure and, for god’s sake, Medicine!) is a needle-dropper’s dream, and all the ancillary characters are rendered memorably via oddball personalities and catchphrases. It’s so cheesy and wonderful and beautifully dated to its moment in time, and though it’ll never be enshrined by the American Film Institute, it’ll forever be a cult classic, especially for those of us fond of their embarrassing days of deep navel-gazing.

Again: This property screams, DO NOT REMAKE, OR YOU’LL PAY DEARLY. But IP being the false idol worshipped by current cinema fools, the teat must be milked until the goat is a desiccated husk. Which isn’t to say The Crow Two-thousand-twenty-four is uniformly terrible, but it seemed doomed from the get-go, with a miniscule margin for success. It’s the best among a trio of duds in Sanders’ filmography (see also: Ghost in the Shell, Snow White and the Huntsman), which showcases a stylishly burly aesthetic and a gross inability to render any of it memorably. 

Sanders and screenwriters Zach Baylin and William Schneider play fast and loose with the internal “rules” of Crow-dom – Eric’s ability to shrug off otherwise fatal injury comes and goes at plot’s whim – and seem to be forcing the square peg of Crow gothiness into a round John Wick-sized hole of stylish ultraviolence as the plot slogs through a drab kill-’em-all-and-let-god-sort-’em-out revenge tour. Everything looks wet and ugly and overstyled as the ever-capable Sarsgaard finds no opportunities to flash his charisma. He just ends up splashing around in shallow puddles, as apt a metaphor for this doomed remake as any. If the original film was Nine Inch Nails, the remake is Gravity Kills. 

Our Call: Do not FIRE IT UP. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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