Review: The Crow (1994)

A remake of The Crow just came out last weekend. I heard it sucked, so I decided to go back and watch the original instead.

The Crow (1994)

Rated R for a great amount of strong violence and language, and for drug use and some sexuality

Score: 4 out of 5

Stop me if you've heard this one: exactly one year after they did something horrible, a group of hoodlums are stalked and murdered by a ruthless, seemingly supernatural killer who happens to look a lot like the man whose death they were responsible for. It's a setup for a slasher movie in the vein of Prom Night or I Know What You Did Last Summer, a mood that this film definitely tilts towards in how it frames its killer, but make no mistake: The Crow is not a slasher movie, and the killer is not a villain. Rather, Eric Draven is framed as a gothic superhero, somebody who makes Batman look like Superman, a fact that, together with its stunning style, an outstanding performance from Brandon Lee that would've made him a star under better circumstances, and the real-life on-set tragedy that made its production notorious, has made this film an enduring classic among generations of goth kids, horror fans, and superhero fans. It's a movie that's pure style over substance, but one where that style is so much fun to watch, and the substance just enough to hold it up, that I barely noticed the thinly-written supporting cast or the many moments where it was clear that they were working around Lee's death trying to get the film in a releasable state. Thirty years later, The Crow is a film that's simultaneously of its time but also timeless, and simply a rock-solid action thriller on top of it.

Set in Detroit, where the weak are killed and eaten (the film barely mentions the setting, but the comic it's based on makes it explicit), the film starts on Devil's Night where a young couple, the musician Eric Draven and his fiancé Shelly Webster, are brutally murdered in their apartment by a gang of criminals, who we later learn targeted them because Shelly was involved in community activism to prevent evictions in a neighborhood controlled by the ruthless crime lord Top Dollar. However, according to legend, the souls of the dead are taken to the afterlife by a crow, and if somebody died in an especially tragic way that they didn't deserve, then that crow can resurrect them to give them a chance to set things right. This is what happens to Eric exactly one year later, causing him to set out to take his revenge on his and Shelly's killers and protect those who they continue to menace.

A huge component of this film's mystique to this day revolves around Brandon Lee, and how it was intended as his big star vehicle that likely would've been his ticket to the A-list if not the fact that, thanks to its chaotic production and the crew's lackadaisical attitude towards safety, he wound up suffering a fatal accident on set with a prop gun that turned out to have not been as safe as the crew thought it was. (Chad Stahelski, who went on to direct the John Wick movies, was one of Lee's stunt doubles here, and now you know why production on the John Wick movies never uses real guns on set.) The tragedy alone would've given Lee an aura comparable to River Phoenix (who was also considered for the part), Heath Ledger, Paul Walker, or Chadwick Boseman, especially given how his father, martial arts legend Bruce Lee, also died young, but the truth is, watching him as Eric Draven, this really was the kind of star-in-the-making performance that makes you mourn the lost potential almost as much as the man himself. Lee walks a fine line here between playing an unstoppable killer who's framed as almost a horror monster on one hand and still making him sympathetic, charismatic, and attractive on the other, the result feeling like a man with a hole in his heart fueled by rage at what he lost who seems to be straight-up enjoying his revenge at times, especially with some of his one-liners. Had he lived, I could easily imagine Lee having had the career as an action hero that Keanu Reeves ultimately did, such was the strength of his performance in this one film. He kicks as much ass as you'd expect, especially given that he also handled much of the fight choreography and took every opportunity in the action scenes to show off how he was very much Bruce Lee's son, but he also brings a strange warmth to the character such that I didn't just wanna see him kick ass and take names, I wanted to see him win.

That strange warmth is ultimately the film's secret weapon. Its dark aesthetics and tone and grisly violence go hand-in-hand with a story about loving life, because this is the one life we have to live and it could easily be taken away from us. Gothic it may be, but nihilistic it is not. Eric may look like a horror movie monster, but he is still a hero, a man who goes out of his way to help and protect the innocent and redirect those who are on the wrong path just as he goes after the unrepentant bastards who bring misery to the community. He felt more like a proper superhero than a lot of examples from movies in the last ten years, which seem more interested in the "super" part of the equation and the awesome fight scenes it enables than the "hero" part. There's a reason the tagline on the poster is "Believe in Angels," and not "Vengeance is Coming" or something along those lines. At its core, this is a movie about getting a second chance to set things right, one in which the things that have to be set right just so happen to involve a lot of righteous violence, and by the time the credits rolled, I felt oddly uplifted having seen it. Not exactly the feeling you expect to have when you watch a film with this one's reputation!

The villains here are mostly one-note caricatures, working largely in the context of the film as a whole and because of the actors playing them. Top Dollar is a cartoonish, if charismatic, madman who wants to burn down the city just for the hell of it, his half-sister/incestuous lover Myca is a sadistic vamp who cuts out women's eyes, and his assorted goons all constantly behave in ghoulish ways so that you don't feel bad when Eric kills them. Ernie Hudson's character, the police officer Albrecht, exists largely to serve as a stand-in for the audience learning who and what Eric is. They work less as characters than as part of the fabric of the world that this movie builds, a version of Detroit that resembles a mix of Gotham City out of Tim Burton's Batman and something close to a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It's a city where the streets are winding, decrepit, shrouded in darkness, and all too often devoid of people, as though everybody moved out to the suburbs a long time ago, with the only centers of activity being nightclubs, bars, and pawn shops that are all run by gangsters. Between this and Dark City, it definitely feels like director Alex Proyas has a thing for this style of urban noir setting taken all the way into the realm of the utterly fantastical, and he makes the city feel... well, "alive" isn't the right word given that it's depicted as a place that's falling to pieces, but definitely a character in its own right. He does a lot to build this film's mood, staging much of it like a horror movie whether it's in the scenes of Eric stalking his prey or the action scenes where an unstoppable supernatural killer shrugs off everything that gets thrown at him like Jason Voorhees, and it works wonders in making for a very unique take on the superhero genre, especially thirty years later when the genre has come to be associated with blockbuster action. The soundtrack, too, does wonders to set the mood, loaded with '80s goth rock and '90s alternative that pairs well with Eric Draven's backstory as a rock star (especially when paired with the scenes of him playing guitar on the roof in the dead of night) and which I imagine turned a lot of young Gen-Xers into fans of The Cure. That kind of music might be a cliché today, but there's a reason it endures.

The Bottom Line

Skip the remake and check out the original, which remains a classic for a reason. It's not a perfect film, but it's one that still holds up to this day as not just a monument to a man who died too soon but also as a very well-made action/horror flick that I'm surprised more superhero movies since haven't tried to imitate.