director
Alex Proyas
screenwriters
David J. Schow
John Shirley
based
on characters created by
James O'Barr
producers
Jeff Most
Edward R. Pressman
Bob Rosen
cinematographer
Dariusz Wolski
music
Graeme Revell
editors
Dov Hoenig
M. Scott Smith
cast
Brandon Lee (Eric Draven)
Ernie Hudson (Albrecht)
Michael Wincott (Top Dollar)
David Patrick Kelly (T-Bird)
Angel David (Skank)
Rochelle Davis (Sarah)
Ling Bai (Myca)
Laurence Mason (Tin Tin)
Michael Massee (Funboy)
Bill Raymond (Mickey)
Anna Levine (Darla)
Tony Todd (Grange)
Jon Polito (Gideon)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 102m
u.s.
release: 5/11/94
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other alex
proyas films
reviewed on this website:
- dark
city
- i, robot
|
The
Crow would be morbid
and sepulchral even if Brandon Lee had survived the making
of it. Without the ugly novelty of the fact that Lee died on
the set, filming a routine gunplay scene that has been accomplished
in hundreds of movies without fatal incident, I'm not proud to
admit that I wouldn't have bothered with The Crow. Yet
the on-set tragedy feeds into what the film wants to be about.
Stylistically akin to Highlander and dozens of tedious
direct-to-video movies, thematically identical to such pop standards
as Batman, Darkman,
Swamp Thing, and all the others that invite us to applaud
a loner's revenge on the scum who took everything away from him,
this is every inch a comic-book movie. Hardly a shock, since
it's based on a comic book. And like a lot of superhero
comics of the '90s, The Crow is angry, anguished, saturnine,
"complex" -- in a word, pretentious. There's much babble
about memory, about transcendence of death. Some may view the
movie itself as proof of that: Brandon lives on -- here he is,
in his final performance. Yet too much of The Crow gets
off on death for it to be a celebration of immortality.
Lee plays Eric Draven, a guitarist who dies at the hands of a
pack of vicious thugs, who also rape and murder his fiancée.
(Lee himself was set to marry his own fiancée; he died
two weeks before the scheduled wedding.) A year later, Eric claws
his way out of the grave, not much the worse for wear, and hunts
down his killers. That's essentially the movie, though screenwriters
David J. Schow and John Shirley, adapting James O'Barr's cult
comic, give Eric some buddies: a sympathetic cop (Ernie Hudson),
a tough, skateboarding little girl (Rochelle Davis), and a crow
that sometimes serves as Eric's eyes (and sometimes snacks on
his enemies' eyes). But ultimately Eric is alone in his annihilating
fury of grief. Given the number of tormented flashbacks to the
fiancée's agonized death, The Crow seems to aspire
to be a meditation on despair in the wake of a violent act. But
Rambo had flashbacks, too.
Co-scripter David Schow is the brightest light in the horror-fan
magazine Fangoria, for which he writes a column that often
focuses on his adventures among the real-life ghouls and vampires
at the Hollywood studios. Much of his graveyard wit is detectable
in the dialogue of the lead villain, Top Dollar (Michael Wincott).
"Die already," Top Dollar sneers at a man he's just
impaled. Schow, however, isn't overly interested in the redemptive
aspects of the material, the theme of a hero rising from the
ashes. Nor does ambiguity detain him. We should sense that Eric's
revenge deforms whatever humanity he has left. But that's not
what the young audience responds to. For all its high-flown visuals
and metaphysics, The Crow has a most basic, crude appeal:
It sets up repulsive bad guys and prompts us to cheer when Eric
slashes them down. It's Death Wish for Clive Barker fans.
The movie's bitter vengefulness burns away any spiritual core
it could ever claim to have.
The Crow's twisted roots grow in real agony. James O'Barr
wrote and drew the comic, he says, to exorcise the rage and pain
that nearly engulfed him after his fiancée was killed.
A genuine wounded heart beats under the surface of hip nihilism,
and Brandon Lee does his best to locate it. Would his performance
be as moving without all the irony attached? I tried to forget,
but death is stubbornly integral to the movie. Let's say that
Lee has perfectly fine moments; he gives Eric a human soul, particularly
when he's enjoying the terror he strikes in the hearts of evildoers.
But the role is too sketchy for Lee to do anything truly startling
with it. We know almost nothing about Eric or his fiancée;
if we blink, we miss the reason that she was targeted for a hit.
The Crow, I'm afraid, shows only the first small flexing
of acting muscle. The real irony is that Lee will never do better
than this, and he might well have.
As for the much-touted directorial "style" and "dark
vision," it gave me a headache. Alex Proyas, a veteran of
rock videos, can't get enough of murk, flashy editing, grating
industrial music. Proyas is trying to create a specific, alien
cityscape that advances, visually, the theme of the story. What
rookies like Proyas forget about movies like Batman,
Blade Runner, and Brazil is that they take time to
invite you in; the camera caresses the design, gives you some
bearings. Visually, The Crow is jumpy and off-putting
right from the start, and we've seen much of it before anyway.
(There is one satisfying image: Eric puts a flame to an outline
of gasoline, which ignites and forms a fiery crow.) Proyas recruits
great, oily character actors like Jon Polito and David Patrick
Kelly, but the editing fractures their performances.
Despite our heart-of-stone reputations, we reviewers can be a
sentimental lot, and our impulse is to go easy on a posthumous
movie like The Crow -- to applaud the filmmakers for having
completed production (though there's a necrophilic ickiness about
it, no matter how many cast and crew members insist that Lee
would have wanted filming to continue), and to attest that the
late star's final appearance is a worthy swan song. In this case,
we also recognize the poignance of a visual record of the renewal
of a career aborted by fate. Lee had made several other films,
mostly chop-socky junk in the tradition of his father, Bruce
Lee; The Crow was going to be his break-out role. The
ironies create a dark membrane between us and what's actually
on the screen.
Some critics may buy into the movie's bleak mystique, or it may
just be wishful thinking. But I doubt that anyone would be raving
about The Crow, or flocking to see it, if its star were
still alive to promote it on Letterman. The movie is simply more
of the same gritty superhero nonsense that appeals to depressed
15-year-old boys (and their 30-year-old counterparts who never
grew up, who haunt comics shops in search of the latest title
in DC's tortured Vertigo line). And it's not done all that well,
either. The feelings of loss and rage just lead to action scenes,
which are wash-outs. The movie's true source of pain, clearly,
is what happened to Brandon Lee on the morning of March 31, 1993.
That's what critics are grabbing at to insist that his last film
is something special. There was more genuine horror and rage
in Robin Williams' trembling, heartsick performance on TV's Homicide
some months back -- he played a tourist whose wife was shot dead
right in front of him -- than in all of The Crow. |