The 90s were a great time to be a disaffected youth, it seems. Korn and Pearl Jam were burning up the charts, leather pants were in great abundance, and MTV had not yet turned into a burning cesspool of shit. I was but a young child then, but I have read the ancient scrolls, studied our people’s tales, and know it to be true.
Comic books were affected by this cultural shift as well. Forget that truth and justice shit, the money was in anti-heroes: costumes as black as their deadened soul, their perpetual nights spent killing nameless gang members and lamenting how miserable their existence is. Spawn, created by Todd McFarlane, was the breakout star of that period, which eventually spawned (heh) an unimpressive movie starring John Leguizamo as a shitty clown (the role he was born to play) and an alright animated series. Other series followed suit, including The Darkness, which got its own video game for some reason, and The Crow, which has ended up inspiring more films than the illustrious Spawn has done so far. Of course, those other films are generally shat-upon sequels, but the numbers don’t lie damn it!
For reference, I’m talking about the original Crow movie now.
The plot begins as so: The night before Halloween in a crime ridden, Tim Burton’s Batman-esque city, an apartment has been set aflame by unknown assailants. Shelley Webster, well known doer of things, has been viciously raped and brutalized and her ultra-cool rockstar boyfriend Eric Draven (get it?) is murdered. Ernie Hudson, who’s playing the ‘cop who’s not an asshole’ in this movie, tells the grunge girl who hangs out with this couple (she’s a prominent character in this film, yet apparently not prominent enough for me to remember her name) that’s Shelley is going to be okay, but we all know that ain’t happening. It’s all very emotional, but as soon as I laid eyes on Ernie Hudson, all that plot junk just faded from my mind. God damn do I love Ghostbusters. Also there’s a crow there, he kinda flaps around
One year later, on the night that has been nicknamed ‘Devil’s Night’ by the fearful citizenry, Eric Draven (the late Brandon Lee, son of the late Bruce Lee lives again! Recognizing Eric’s thirst for vengeance, the crow grants him life once more, as well as a nice collection of vaguely defined powers . You would think that being given superpowers by a bird would give Eric bird-based powers ala Spider-Man, but no, he’s just invincible. Which really isn't a power so much as it is a thing a 10 year old trots out when he doesn't want to lose a play fight with his friends but whatever, it’s not my movie.
Eric Draven is now The Crow, I guess, because they never actually call him The Crow the entire movie. Hell, I don’t think they even say the word ‘crow’ more than a few times in the movie, which has got to be intentional on the film makers part. Anyways, Draven is now a totally awesomesauce superhero now, wearing leather clothes and harlequin face paint, busting out tasty licks on his guitar, and spouting out statements about love and pain that kinda sound philosophical if you don’t think about it too hard. I think at this point we’re supposed to feel sorry for Draven and his situation, but it’s played up so much that it veers from sympathetic to comical extremely quickly. Anyways, Draven receives a vision from his unexplained vision powers that flashes back to Devil’s Night one year previous, giving him the names and faces of those bad bad dudes who killed him and Shelley Webster. With that in mind, Draven makes it his mission in unlife to find and kill this gang of hoods, in ways that are both violent and ironic, while dodging the cops in typical superhero fashion. Murder is so much cooler when you can say ‘oh, I see what he did there’.
By the way, if ‘a gang kills some guy, then that guy comes back and kills the gang members one by one until he reaches the boss’ sounds familiar, that’s because that was more of less the plot to Robocop. And probably several dozen other movies and video games, but mainly Robocop. I hope that when the Goku/Superman debates finally die down, perhaps in the next century or two, we can get started on Robocop vs. The Crow.
Our film’s villains are what have now become classic action movie thugs, a mix of wildly anarchistic and somewhat competent. How can someone who swallows bullets with his shot of whiskey also be smart enough to fancy looking time-bombs? We just accept it and move on, because we know that fucker is definitely getting blown up at some point in the future. Their boss (who I also can’t remember the name of, if they even give him a name in the movie) is the weirdest of them all; Fucking girls to death, making out with his creepy Asian sister, shooting folks seconds after he asks them a question because he’s ‘bored’, he does it all. Why does he make out his sister? How does he control a city-wide crime organization if he constantly kills people out of boredom? It’s an exaggerated, cartoonish level of villainy that I enjoyed in Pretorius from Bride of Frankenstein, yet find more silly than endearing here. Maybe Pretorius seemed a more limited, human character to me as compared to this longhaired, katana-wielding freakazoid, I don’t know. I could be contradicting myself here.
Comic book movies haven’t always been the million dollar blockbusters you know and love today, believe it or not. Up until a few years ago, the comic book movie ‘genre’ tended to vary between cheesy, shitty, or a combination of the two from movie to movie. For me, The Crow falls within the cheesy-but-not-that-shitty territory. The characters (sans Ernie Hudson of course), despite so gritty and alternative, were either a bit too one-dimensional or barely present for me to form any sort of emotional connections, and the antagonist’s scheme is stupid as hell. I do enjoy the aesthetic, and the action is passable, which was probably the whole point of the movie anyway. It won’t make your eyes bleed, unless you’re so goth you cry tears of blood, but I’d go for Robocop every time.
Result: Recommended if you’re a fan of the comic, internal torment, or hard-rocking alternative/industrial rock tunes.
Not Recommended if you hate average action movies, Tim Burton, goths, or Sting.
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