Rating: 2 Stars
The following review contains spoilers.
Overview:
A crime lord in Detroit uses the excuse of “Devil’s Night”, the night before Halloween, to commit various crimes in the guise of anarchy. Among those crimes is sending a gang of men to deal with a woman, Shelly who had been campaigning to stop wrongful evictions of tenants from his properties. The men rape and kill her, then kill her fiancée, Eric, and throw him out a window. A year later Eric is reborn with the help of a magic crow, given supernatural abilities (particularly a nearly instantaneous healing factor), and sets out for revenge on the men who killed him and his partner.
Meanwhile, there is no meanwhile, because that’s really the entire plot of the movie. It’s a very straightforward revenge story, with no particular character arcs or themes. They do add other things, like a street kid named Sarah that was friends with Eric and Shelly, and whose mom is sleeping with one of the gang members, and a cop named Albrecht, formerly a detective who has been busted back down to street cop for the sin of being too good a copy in a city gone wrong (presumably). At some point you assume one of them will try to convince Eric that revenge is bad or something, but they sure don’t. Albrecht actually gets suspended from the force and decides to help Eric kill the remaining gang members.
In the end, Eric has killed all four members of the gang, and is satisfied to lay down and die, even though the crime boss who ordered it all in the first place is still alive. Not really seeing the forest for the trees, you could say. But fortunately or unfortunately, said crime boss (named “Top Dollar”), doesn’t know Eric is ready to die, and kidnaps Sarah in order to draw him out. Like he could’ve just wait another couple hours and Eric would’ve been dead and Top Dollar could’ve gone back to having sex with his half-sister and smoking people’s eyeballs or whatever it is he likes to do. Somehow the bad guys have determined that the crow itself is the source of Eric’s powers, so they try to kill it, but they only graze it, and so Eric only loses half of his powers, particularly his healing. He does still, however, have the ability to absorb and transfer memories (naturally), so in a last-ditch effort, fighting Top Dollar on the roof of a church, he transfers Albrecht’s memory of sitting with Shelly until she died into Top Dollar’s brain, and Top Dollar is so struck by this that he just falls off the church and impales himself on a bunch of spikes. Revenge… complete!
Best Parts:
It’s hard to talk about The Crow without talking about Brandon Lee’s on-set accidental death. I don’t know if Lee necessarily would’ve been a big star if he’d lived, but he might’ve been, as he’s the best part of the movie. He’s essentially The Punisher if The Punisher was also The Joker, but he’s good at it. His assured delivery in scenes like the one where Albrecht confronts him for the first time, telling him, “I say you move and you’re dead,” replying, “And I say I’m dead… and I move,” are a big part of the reason why this movie is remembered, I expect.
Well, that and the make-up and overall character design. Eric and Shelly owned some kind of harlequin mask (who doesn’t?), and when Eric returns from the dead, he uses the mask as inspiration for the make-up he wears on his killing spree. I wonder how future sequels will justify other “crows” adopting the same make-up, or if they will even bother trying to explain it.
Worst Parts:
It’s barely a movie. I’m not saying all movies have to follow the same structure and have, like, a main character who learns a lesson, because of plenty of movies don’t do that and are still quite good, but this movie just feels so slight and so empty. It feels like just another in a long line of “city centers are very scary and bad!” crime movies, except with more harlequin make-up and scene transitions where an animated crow flies down the street. The entire thing is simply: criminals kill man and woman, man comes back from the dead to kill them, then returns to the grave. Every scene that isn’t directly fulling that meager premise is essentially filling time to get to feature length.
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