Why You Didn’t Like … The Crow (2024)

I watched the 2024 reboot of The Crow on a recent flight, and while I didn’t turn it off (hello, Godzilla x Kong, a truly terrible movie), I did almost fall asleep several times despite watching it at a body-clock 10am. Parents, take note: this is the solution for putting your newborn to sleep when they keep waking you at 2am.

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This isn’t a review comparing this 2024 release to the 1994 outing. The Brandon Lee movie was marred by his tragic death and exists as a cult classic. Even unfinished, it’s more compelling throughout; its flaws are related to the lead’s passing, which left filming incomplete, rather than systemic issues with writing or pacing. No, the 2024 version fails all on its own. It suffers from critical plot and pacing issues that betray the promise of its trailer and, ultimately, the entire premise of the story.

It’s because the film misunderstands what a revenge story birthed in violence needs to deliver. First, we need the violence, and we need it faster than The Crow serves it up. Second, our hero needs to deliver the revenge, rather than leaving the job to a bunch of river snakes. The 2024 movie wastes its runtime on things that don’t matter, and hard fails on the moments that do.

The Wasted Hour

The biggest problem with The Crow is its runtime. I’d argue it wastes two-thirds of its 1 hour and 51 minutes flagellating us with things that are either frustrating or don’t matter. It feels like it’s a good one-third of the movie, maybe even half, before things start to get interesting.

The film spends time building the relationship between Eric and Shelly, a relationship we already know about going in and which the trailers manage to get across in a minute or so. However, for some reason we still spend a lot of time seeing them meeting, then falling in love. Somewhere out there is a screenwriter who thought this would lend weight to their deaths, but their deaths are simply an excuse for a one-man-army revenge movie, and Ref: point A, we already know about their love going in.

John Wick understood this. It was a revenge movie about the death of a dog, which was a metaphor for a life Wick tried to live, and a love he tried to have, but was denied. Wick’s dog moment is early in his movie, and we don’t linger on it, but in The Crow, killing that damn dog takes about an hour. Following Eric and Shelly around through their broken lives doesn’t add depth or meaning; it just layers time and padding onto a movie that lacks the fight scenes needed to pick up the remains of this fail, adding to our crushing ennui.

Instead of feeling the tragedy, I felt the lack of an escape from the airplane. Thank God for in-flight Wi-Fi; at least I could check my Signal messages while I waited for Eric and Shelly’s deaths to actually happen.

There’s other weirdness at play. We get scenes of Eric as a kid dealing with a dying horse, but it’s never explained how this relates to his choices in the movie, aside from giving him a couple of scars on his hands for flavour. We also get to see Eric bullied by people in the youth detention facility he’s in—it’s similarly unexplained how this presumably deep and formative character moment propels him to make different choices. There is no grand hero’s journey for Eric; he turns up in our lives as damaged goods, dies, and doesn’t become undamaged. His arc is defined by his powers, not his personality, falling into what I’d call the Marvel Conceit of Bad Storytelling.

While this is happening, the actual plot driver is a frustrating piece of mummery. Shelly has terrible evidence against the Big Bad™, but despite having this amazing and powerful tool, she doesn’t do anything other than run. It ensures her destruction. It’s a frustrating McGuffin because it’s never demonstrated how she could have had this in the first place. The Big Bad™ is a sort of devil satanist Dark Side creation, and somehow, despite years on Earth dealing with mortals, he fails to do anything other than fail. He’s presented as a long-term planner, Evil with a pension plan, but somehow he doesn’t know how cellphone cameras work.

A Glimmer of a Good Movie

Having said all that, when the action finally kicks in, you can see the movie that could have been. The ’main’ fight scene of the movie, conducted during an opera, is pretty good! It’s appropriately gory and wince-worthy, with decent choreography that helps us understand how Everyday Guy™ Eric is able to take out armed enforcers.

Our opera moment is draped in rich finery. Eric has a totally badass coat, and extra badass makeup. The opera takes place in a building appropriate for the rich and famous to meet their doom, and Eric’s introduction—alone, dirty, a mistakethat shouldn’t have happened—leads us to know this is The Moment. You know the one: where everyone is about to get wrecked.

The movie uses this moment of clarity to acknowledge that Eric isn’t a ninja. He’s just some guy fresh out of rehab with one peculiar ability: he can’t die. This makes sense of his brutish, realistic fighting style. He’s a guy who never wanted to be here and didn’t spend his life seeding in aikido classes for that one time he came back from the dead and needed a revenge kick. Eric can’t do judo and has no great skills as a marksman. He’s a force of the supernatural, and if he’s run through with a sword, he will stagger forward and impale his attacker with the weapon still sticking out of his chest. Eric soaks up amazing amounts of damage in order to damage someone else, showing his work ethic. Eric is committed. His march is relentless, a river of pain he rows down to achieve his goal, and we can definitely feel every hit he takes to “put the wrong things right.” It’s actually a clever flip on horror movie tropes. Usually, it’s the hellborn enemy who survives amazing levels of damage to kill the teen protagonists. Here, Eric is the teen protagonist, going through hell on earth to become the unstoppable force.

But that’s the problem. While this scene is great, there’s simply not enough of it.

The Villain Problem

As a revenge story, The Crow leaves a lot on the table, and a huge part of that comes down to its villains. You don’t cast an actor like Laura Birn, who is epically awesome as the tortured machine Demerzel in Apple TV’s Foundation, only to park her off to the side.

Birn’s Marion is a sort of gopher for the main villain, Danny Huston’s Vincent. For someone who’s the right hand of the devil’s right hand, she’s remarkably inept and powerless. She doesn’t see her own betrayal coming. She doesn’t have legions of people who can outsmart Eric—a junkie youth with a history of bad life choices. She has some foot soldiers, but she’s not directing them; they’re just at the opera, dying, while she’s in a room worrying about her own death. Given Marion’s scorecard in the movie, it’s a wonder she’s made it past retail management. This is a writing and directing fail, and makes me pine for the next season of Foundation even more.

Which brings us to the Big Bad™ himself. Vincent’s fall, when it comes, is not as visceral and personal as we’d hoped. Our final confrontation has Eric turn up and give him the bash, but… Well, let’s pause for a moment on what might have been. There’s a core conceit where Vincent has a sort of consumption power and hoovers up Eric’s raven-powered blood. He pulls the blood into himself during our fight. And I thought, hell yes, here we go! Eric is going to lose his powers and have to win as a mortal! We’ll see how his moment of childhood tragedy with the dying horse allows him to punch through. We’ll see how his being unflinching in the face of institutional bullying makes him stronger than Vincent’s dark arts.

I flew high, but man, did I crash hard. That moment’s left on the table. Instead, Vincent and Eric are pulled into the afterlife’s purgatory junction, where Vincent literally falls into a puddle and is eaten by whatever lives in there. It’s a clear moment of cosmic powers offing Vincent. His death becomes a heaven-and-hell event rather than what we came here for: to see a mortal squeezing the life from his sworn enemy. It’s Eric’s job to, as the movie puts it, “Put the wrong things right.” It’s not up to mystical snakes in a puddle to do this work for him, and it robs us, the audience, of any release.

There Are Many Wrong Things to Put Right

In the end, The Crow is a movie that feels padded and pointless for more than an hour, only to deny us the very catharsis a revenge story is built on. The few good moments of brutal, realistic action are buried under meaningless backstories and motivations that go nowhere.

Sure, the acting across the board is… fine. There’s nothing here that’s tremendously memorable, positively or negatively. And that’s odd. The Crowbrings in newer actors like Bill Skarsgård and FKA twigs, and dusts off longtime professional Danny Huston to wear the evil shoes, but none of them are given enough to create a truly lasting performance. You simply don’t cast actors like Huston and especially Laura Birn and give them so little to work with.

It’s a film that mistakes moping for depth. It substitutes a supernatural ending for a satisfying one. This isn’t a fail as a reboot; it’s a fail as a movie, all the more damning because of the sensational graphic novel it’s pulled from. James O’Barr’s original comic understood something this adaptation doesn’t: revenge stories need momentum, not meditation. The graphic novel gets Eric back from the dead and into action quickly, spending its pages on the hunt rather than the setup. O’Barr knew his readers came for cathartic violence, not romantic backstory—the love story exists in memory and pain, not in extended exposition that slows everything down. The comic’s Eric personally delivers justice to each of his tormentors. There are no mystical puddle-snakes doing the heavy lifting. When you have source material that already solved these fundamental storytelling problems back in 1989, choosing to ignore those solutions isn’t creative interpretation—it’s self-harm. This 2024 version had a blueprint for how to make revenge feel satisfying and instead chose to reinvent the wheel as a square.

What did you think of The Crow? Let me know in the comments below. If you wanted fewer magical snakes, click Like. If you’re interested in reviews that get to the point faster than the first half of The Crow…

Speaking of supernatural stories where the heroes don’t rely on questionable magic, check out my urban fantasy novel, The Three Faces of Fate.