THE CROW Remake Reviews Are Tearing the Movie to Shreds

The Crow remake has finally hit theaters, and it is being completely smashed to prices by critics and audiences. I mean, we all knew this movie was going to be bad after that first trailer was released, and now everyone is proving that making this movie was a waste of money and talent.

The movie currently has a 19% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes and many people are calling the film "soulless," "lifeless," and "empty".

If someone is going to attempt to tell this story of The Crow again, they’ve got to make sure it’s a great film, something that could be considered better than the original, otherwise, what’s the point of remaking it!?

I was going to see this movie this weekend, but I’m not sure I want to give this film any of my money.

I’ve included a collection of excerpts from reviews below

Richard Crouse: The Crow is back, but, unfortunately, never really takes flight. For a movie about soulmates, and with a villain who dooms souls to hell, the new film feels soulless.

Roger Moore: Never overcomes a general heartlessness that permeates even the abrupt romance that supposedly launches and drives it.

Felix Vasquez Jr.: “The Crow” is an infuriating movie. Lionsgate still has no idea what to do with it; it’s a story that would speak waves, especially in today’s social climate.

Michael Gingold: For an unnecessary remake like this one, following a trio of underachieving sequels to the 1994 original, a dead horse may not be the best image to lead off with.

Fico Cangiano: A big dud. Quite boring - drags for the first 40 minutes and includes unlikable characters with hollow motives. Also, hurt by weak acting - with the lead channeling Anakin's delivery from the Star Wars prequels.

Andrew Parker: The Crow takes a familiar concept and turns it into one of the most leaden, spark-free, and dull "superhero" origin stories ever adapted to film. It makes every wrong decision along the way and manages to be equally as bad as all the sequels...

William Bibbiani: When you stifle the emotional simplicity of a story like The Crow to emphasize the plot, the plot had better make sense. And it doesn’t. It’s got perplexing rules and a vague chronology and nothing seems like it matters anymore.

Kristy Puchko: Ugly, incoherent, and ultimately cynical, The Crow evokes the words of wisdom from another horror movie about resurrected corpses on a rampage: Sometimes dead is better.

Lyvie Scott: It's almost ironic how such a soulful concept can be damned by a lack of material.

Witney Seibold: Thanks to sloppy editing and a general lack of basic storytelling acumen, events speed past without much explanation, emotional resonance, or, in some scenes, basic communication… dull, lifeless, [and] meaningless."

Ryan Lattanzio: The Crow is not a waste of talent or resources; worse, it just hangs there on the screen, as undead as Eric himself.

Tim Grierson: Brandon Lee’s original was hard to shake because of his untimely demise. This forgettable new version doesn’t just fail to honour his memory -- it never justifies its existence on its own merits.

Esther Zuckerman: A genuinely perplexing film. I mean that on a broad level: How did Hollywood struggle for decades to reboot this property and end up with such a lackluster product?

Aaron Neuwirth: With little stylization, a generic plotline removing much of what made the original comics at least standout, and the clearest feeling of “why watch this when I can watch that,” this is less of a bird that got away, and more like a bad egg altogether.

David Rooney: The Crow is a sluggish, overly self-serious gloomfest that never takes wing.

Benjamin Lee: The Crow 2.0 is a total, head-in-hands disaster, incoherently plotted and sloppily made, destined to join the annals of the very worst and most pointless remakes ever made.

Barry Hertz: Incoherent and cheap, with its aesthetic sensibilities seemingly cribbed from an elevator pitch of “John Wick goes goth,” Sanders’s version of The Crow is a truly ugly thing to endure.

Then there’s this review a friend sent me from Ltterbooxed that I thought I’d post. It was written by FrozenIIFan2004:

“I know this film is still under embargo but since I'm not a certified film critic, fuck it I'll give out my full thoughts on it since it did release in my country today.

“I went into this film willing to give this a chance and hoping to enjoy it, but I left feeling pissed off. The Crow (2024) was absolutely rubbish and the people who suspected that this movie was already doomed to fail in the first place were right.

“In fact, this is the worst comic book film of 2024 hands down. This makes Madame Web look like Deadpool & Wolverine in comparison. At least Madame Web had decent characters, something I can't say about this film. And at least Madame Web is kinda memorable.

“Just an hour after watching this film as I'm writing this, I already forgot a lot that happened in this film because of how bland, soulless, lackluster, and boring it is. The fact that it's boring as hell is the main reason this film sucked. It's so boring that it makes you wonder what kind of movie you're watching.

“There's such a lack of action here. There are a couple of scenes in the 3rd act involving shooting and killing, but there's only 2 major action scenes in this entire film and both action scenes I'm talking about were shown in the trailer plus they even got their own clips. Those two action scenes were the only redeeming quality in this film, especially the opera scene which was admittedly dope.

“The other violent scenes that weren't "action" scenes were admittedly pretty good especially the gore being present. But those action scenes, even the scenes of just violence, were all in the 3rd act of the film. This did not feel like a Crow movie, let alone a comic book film. It felt more like a freaking melodrama.

“The first act of the film focuses on the romance between Eric and Shelly, who's chemistry isn't even good to begin with. There's this entire backstory of how the two of them met. Couldn't care less about that. 45 minutes into the film was where the actual story of The Crow started, where Eric and Shelly "die" but then Eric comes back to life. You might think that the action would start there, right? Wrong!

“The second act of the film is basically Eric talking to this wise man who tells him to kill the people who killed him and Shelly and then he finds the people who killed them. The pacing of the movie is so slow that it's insufferable. One of the slowest paced comic book films I've ever seen! The story is nothing like the original in a way where it's not the good type of different.

“It doesn't understand the source material up to the point where it came off as an insult to not just the comics but the original film and especially Brandon Lee's death. The ending of the film literally makes a dumb decision that misses the point of the storyline in the source material.

“Bill Skarsgard gave an okay performance but it felt like the kind of performance you'd expect from a B-list actor, not an A-list one. The other performances were forgettably bland. Even Danny Houston, the other A-list actor in the film, gave a really weak performance as the villain of the film.

“The villain was so forgettable especially with the fact that he was barely in the film. The film lacked that bleak tone the original had and instead went for a more normal style of filmmaking. It barely felt dark. And the soundtrack... WTF was that?!

“Overall, The Crow (2024) is a disgrace to the original film that took away everything fans love about the film in favor of another soulless cash-grabbing reboot that no one asked for. The action scenes are solid, but it's a boring and slow-paced mess.

“Say what you want about Borderlands, Lionsgate's previous film, but at least there was some life to that film and provided enough fun action scenes as well as memorable characters. This movie can go straight into the sewers!”

In the film: “Soulmates Eric Draven (Skarsgård) and Shelly Webster (FKA Twigs) are brutally murdered when the demons of her dark past catch up with them. Given the chance to save his true love by sacrificing himself, Eric sets out to seek merciless revenge on their killers, traversing the worlds of the living and the dead to put the wrong things right.”

This version of the movie stars Bill Skarsgård, singer/actor FKA Twigs, Danny Huston (30 Days of Night), Laura Birn (Foundation), Sami Bouajila (A Son), and Jordan Bolger (The Woman King).