I thought the original graphic novel and the Brandon Lee adaptation of The Crow from the 90s were perfectly fine. They also feel like a property best suited for the goth era they came from. But they went and made three terrible sequels and gave up… and now we have a 2024 reboot.

The flick is about a couple who are murdered and he’s brought back to get revenge. Same plot as before but different villains and a whole lot of fussing around bullshit.

This movie has abysmal pacing. It takes at least thirty minutes to get around to killing our leads. And arguably that time is spent getting to know them better… but that really doesn’t happen. They are boring and all their set up is tedious… and has weird time jumps and “hey wait a minute” moments… as if they cut something out of the script to get the story moving faster (jokes on them).

So that means I spent thirty minutes waiting impatiently for our protagonists to just die already so we can get to the actual movie we came to see. But sadly even after they are offed, it takes another fifteen minutes to get around to a proper resurrection. And, sadly, our newborn hero doesn’t have any particular skills… he doesn’t come back as a back-streets goth mystic avenger… he comes back as a goober who doesn’t know what’s going on and is immediately killed again.

It takes until the hour and ten minute mark for him to actually start some proper crow-ing. One hundred minutes until we get to why we came to see this movie in the first place.

And, to its credit, the flick has a good soundtrack, is shot well, and the single fight scene they staged is petty good. Maybe a little up its own butt with artistic expression but certainly willing to go very brutal (unfortunately, I just watched the infinitely superior actioner The Night Comes For Us which did the splatter combat WAY better).

Bill Skaarsgard plays our Crow-ish hero and… he kind of sucks. I didn’t buy his acting at all and his makeup should have been rethought since it reminded me too much of his Pennywise. Maybe it reflects the comic art, but they should have still reconsidered.

This is a bad, boring, film that has pretensions of being more than it is. I came for the supernatural goth-boy revenge spree and the filmmakers thought they were making something profound or artistic. It ain’t. I wish I could say I loved their attempt at being different, for upending expectations, but it just wasn’t interesting enough for that.

Score: 60