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The Crow review – unfathomably awful goth remake

Rupert Sanders’ attempt to resurrect the 1994 cult revenge thriller has become one of 2024’s most atrocious films

It was no real surprise that a tortured update of 1994’s cursed goth revenge thriller The Crow would be a misfire – it’s been in development since 2008 with multiple directors and actors attached ever since – but it’s genuinely startling just how utterly wretched the finished product is and how unfit it is for a wide release. We never really needed a redo of The Crow in the first place (a simple, solidly enjoyable film lifted by Alex Proyas’s hyper-stylised direction and the presence of the tragic Brandon Lee) but it offered a pre-trodden path that could have led to something far less egregious than this – the formula for a satisfying, tightly plotted revenge thriller being right there for the taking. But writers William Schneider and Zach Baylin (the latter’s credits include the solid sports dramas Creed III, Gran Turismo and King Richard) presume to know better, missing what could have been an easy, if overly derivative, retread and head off in a different, dreadful direction instead.

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