The Crow 2024

I was browsing on Threads and I saw a call out for a podcast guest to come on and talk about the recent Crow remake over on the Stew World Order podcast. I’m a big fan of the original Crow and hadn’t gotten around to seeing the new remake just yet so I agreed to watch it and come on the show to talk about it (we recorded a couple days ago as I’m writing this but the episode won’t air until around August 2026). Now in general, I’m perfectly fine with the concept of remakes. I don’t think it diminishes the original and on a rare occasion it can actually improve upon the original. Or at the very least, be its own separate entity so despite all the negativity I had heard about this movie when it first came out, I thought I’d give it a fair shake and see how it stood on its own terms. It went for a very different tone, this is much more of a serious, grimdark interpretation of the Crow story. I didn’t agree with most of the changes, but by the end I was invested in how the story was going to turn out and I enjoyed myself throughout most of the watch. Now, I do think that this is a deeply flawed movie that has several serious issues that have nothing to do with whether or not it’s a remake, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I was expecting it to be.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with making a Crow movie that’s more serious and dour, what’s really lacking in this version is personality. There are three main characters that are at least somewhat rounded out. Eric Draven as the main character is the most fleshed out, then there’s Shelly who gets a lot more screen time in this version but is mostly absent for obvious reasons for the latter half of the movie. Then we have the villain side of things with Danny Huston playing Vincent Roeg who is basically vampire coded except rather than drinking blood, he sends innocent souls down to hell to prolong his own life and can influence people to do evil things with this demonic whisper in the ear.

Now in the original Crow movie there were interesting henchmen like Tin Tin, Skank, and T-Bird. In this movie there’s Marion and a couple others with regular names and they all have zero personality. Marion has a very brief moment where she confesses that when she started, she saw bad things happening but she wasn’t participating and before she realized it, she was neck deep in it. But that felt rather unearned as she was previously just a presence that kept coming for Shelly. The rest of the henchmen are either nameless or their names barely registered. Even on the other side, there’s no constant presence like Sarah or Officer Albrecht. Instead there’s Zadie who makes a splash at the beginning but gets killed ten minutes in, there’s Dom who gets name dropped but only gets two very brief scenes where he actually has any interactions with the main characters. There’s also the tattoo artist who also only gets a couple brief scenes and on a single viewing it’s unclear whether he was Shelly’s or Eric’s friend. And finally there’s the Mysterious Man who’s credited as Kronos though his name was either never mentioned or mentioned maybe once. He’s more or less the representation of the Skull Cowboy from the original comic and is Eric’s guide who basically explains his powers and his mission, but in the movie he’s a mostly neutral character so he also doesn’t really get much character development and falls pretty flat for most of the film.

The other big difference is the look of this film. Controversially, Eric rather than being a leather jacket wearing rock singer, or Robert Smith from the Cure as what the comic draws inspiration from, here he is a drug addict in forced rehab covered with tattoos who meets Shelly at a state-mandated rehab facility. Its a gritty realism that is fairly controversial especially as the look echoes the look of Jared Leto’s Joker from Suicide Squad. There is an extended period of time where we get to see Shelly and Eric’s relationship begin and develop, but that unfortunately undercuts the overall theme of love that brings Eric back. Even though the original only showed Eric and Shelly’s relationship through flashbacks, they were engaged and about to be married with the implication that they had been together for a long while, enough for that love to blossom, grow, and deepen into true love. In this movie, they are together for maybe a couple weeks, especially as this film also introduces this cell phone video of incriminating evidence that exists before Shelly and Eric meet and is the reason why they get killed. So there is this ticking clock from the very start of their relationship which as presented feels like a whirlwind drug fueled tryst rather than the true love that would inspire Eric to sacrifice himself to save Shelly from damnation.

There are a few interesting elements that were introduced here, this abandoned railway that represents the purgatory-esque plane between the living and the dead has a great feel to it, as does the transitions when Eric is sent between the two planes. It’s also an interesting twist that his Crow powers falter when he sees the incriminating video teased from the beginning of the movie which shows Shelly kill someone, albeit under the influence of Roeg’s demon whisper. And after seeing that video, it introduces doubt into his love for Shelly and causes him to make the deal trading his life for hers and in the process increases his bond with the crow spirits and propels him into the climax. The other downside of that is that it takes well over an hour before Eric is fully the Crow. After this point, he finally becomes the action hero and again, the movie chooses to go for the grimdark visual style which echoes some of the extreme violence of Punisher War Zone without any of the tongue in cheek humor. There is plenty of gore, much of it quite shocking especially during the opera action scene, but it’s never played up as being humorously over the top. Instead it’s presented more artistically with cuts back and forth between the visually striking opera performance for the tone juxtaposition.

Again, there’s a lot of flaws in this film, it could have easily been twenty minutes shorter, and yet there’s also several elements that seem to be missing from this movie. Like the resolution of this innocent young Pianist named Grey who is seen several times accompanying Roeg, but then just disappears from the movie with no resolution to her character. According to IMDb, there were scenes of her being tortured that were cut. There’s also the opening scene with a young Eric trying to free a horse trapped in barbed wire. This scene was inspired by a scene in the original comic, but within the context of the movie had no real bearing to Eric’s personality nor did it add anything to the plot of the movie. It just existed as a weird little tone piece separate from the rest. But while there are a lot of flaws to this movie, there is just enough to hang onto following Eric’s journey. The relationship scenes with him and Shelly work well and are just enough to help connect the audience to his path of revenge, and while the action scenes are quite gory, they are also well choreographed and work in this context. I doubt that this will go on to find a cult audience in the future, but I at least had a decent time with it. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.