The Crow (2024)

The Crow (2024) is fine.

Better than the sequels to the 1994 film, though that wasn’t hard in most cases. (Though I still have a soft spot for City Of Angels, and Salvation lifted an interesting plot twist from one of the novels.)

Different enough from it to have been worth doing, while departing further from the original so being more accurate wasn’t the reason - it adds in two things that weren't there, and makes one direct reference so it's not a nostalgia trip either.

If it hadn’t called its central couple Eric and Shelly it would probably have been accepted as another of the franchise’s many other one-story main characters like the previous films and most of the comics.

The most interesting choice is probably also the one that will most bother people who know the general plot, let alone the other versions:

It takes its time to make us care about its Eric and Shelly and then for Eric to know what’s going on, and as such waits until the third act to get to the “unkillable revenant in facepaint killing lots of people” USP.

The oddly bouncy Joy Division bassline choice makes sense as it plays over an upbeat scene.

It’s very much set in The City.

It continues director Rupert Sanders’s interest in characters in dark opaque liquids. Snow White And The Huntsman had a bunch of corvids too.

The title sequence worked better in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. A sympathetic character who might have been damselled instead just vanishes from the picture. The fight in the opera house is all on the stairs rather than using the auditorium. Eric’s new look is not going to become an iconic poster / toy / Halloween costume favourite. None of the villains are any fun except Danny Huston doing a pretty regular Danny Huston, and not sure why Marion got to avoid dying on screen. And the title character has a lot less to do.

It’s fine.