Movie Review: 'The Crow' is the Worst Movie of 2024 (All Spoilers)

The Crow

Directed by Rupert Sanders

Written by Zach Baylin, William Schneider

Starring Bill Skarsgard, FKA Twigs, Danny Huston

Release Date August 23rd, 2024

Published August 23rd, 2024

What the hell just happened? I saw The Crow last night, as I write this, and the nausea induced by the movie has only begun to subside. Legitimately, I became nauseated by The Crow. Not because the movie is overly gross, I’ve recently watched Caligula, my stomach is damn near bulletproof. No, the queasiness induced by The Crow comes from my poor brain trying to piece together what the hell happened in this movie. The Crow is incomprehensible. The basic pieces are decipherable, but the details are so fragmented, it’s like trying to assemble a puzzle from the pieces from a dozen different puzzles, none of which has all of its pieces.

On a base level, Bill Skarsgard is Eric. He falls in love with Shelly (FKA Twigs). They are both murdered, maybe? He comes back to life, perhaps(?). It may have something to do with Crows? I think. He enacts a violent revenge on people who may or may not be responsible for killing him and Shelly. I have to qualify these statements because the end of the film may or may not indicate that the whole thing was a dream or, perhaps, a Jacob’s Ladder scenario crafted by someone who may not know what a Jacob’s Ladder scenario is.

Spoilers ahead. I am so confounded by this movie that I am just going to explain everything I can rememer from the movie. Beginning to end. I am going to tell you the whole movie and if it somehow makes sense to you, then take to the comments section and explain the movie to me because I am baffled, a little sick, and almost irretrievably confused how anyone watched this and thought it made any sense. The Michael Fassbender movie The Snowman was released without 15 percent of the script having been shot and that movie makes more sense than The Crow.

This is pure stream of consciousness writing from here so please forgive me.

We meet Eric as a child. He lives in a trailer on a farm, I think. His beloved white horse, the only love he’s ever known, is caught in barbed wire and is dying horribly and painfully. Eric’s mother, who may or may not be drunk or high, is briefly seen dozing in the trailer. Eric tries to free the white horse and his hands are cut by barbed wire leaving permanent scars and none of this will matter later. I’ve told you about this, it is what happened on screen, it means nothing in the rest of the movie. We will see the horse and the trailer home in flashbacks later, the trailer home is on fire which may or may not mean Eric’s mom is dead. Who cares? His life before meeting Shelly has no bearing on the movie.

We are then introduced to Shelly as he lazes around an opulent apartment. She gets a frantic call from her friend who says that their friend, Dom, has sent them a video that shows them doing something unspeakable. There is something in the video that very bad people want to make sure never comes to light. Shelly is in danger and she needs to hide or run or something. Shelly’s friend is then captured by the bad guys while she’s on the phone with Shelly. When the call disconnects, Shelly watches the video but we don’t get to see it. She leaves to go check on her friend.

As Shelly leaves the apartment, she notices someone following her so she stumbles into some cops, spilling her purse which is full of drugs of some sort. This gets Shelly arrested and she’s sent to a prison that is also a coed rehab facility. Men and women are housed here and it looks like a prison but it is also a rehab facility, I don’t know. It’s also located in the woods for some reason. Eric is here, this is where they will meet. Meanwhile, Eric is angrily confronted by his fellow inmates during a group therapy session. They yell pieces of his tragic backstory at him, seemingly to get him to react violently, which he doesn’t do. He’s then told that he failed this confrontation by not reacting and is told he needs to participate in his own recovery. Apparently he was supposed to fight back or something, who knows, this also doesn’t matter to the story.

Cut to the bad guy, Roeg, played by Danny Huston. We are told that he’s more than a hundred years old and that he sends innocent souls to hell in exchange for his power, wealth, and ability to stay alive. Shelly's friend who was kidnapped a few scenes ago has been brought to Roeg who confronts her to ask if she knows where Shelly is. Of course, she doesn’t know where Shelly is, friend character was kidnapped, held somewhere, and brought here, all while Shelly was arrested, tried, convicted or plead guilty and sentenced to a forest-rehab-coed-prison. Roeg then whispers in best friend’s ear malevolently causing her to kill herself. Her body is later recovered from a river and the lead henchwoman calls Roeg to say that her body has been found and that this is trouble for them. But why? She killed herself. He made her do that but who the fuck would know that?

Also, why did Roeg make friend character kill herself and then dump the body in the river? What was the point of making her kill herself if you were then going to make it look like she was murdered? So, no one knows where Shelly is and their one lead to her location is now dead right? Wrong, Shelly’s mom is now a character. We will learn that Shelly’s mom sold her soul to Roeg in exchange for fame and fortune. She also sold Shelly’s soul to him as well, I guess. She knows where Shelly is and takes Roeg’s crew to the forest-prison-coed-rehab-facility. During this time, Eric and Shelly briefly have lunch together and vibe. Then they hang out in Eric’s cell and vibe. Then the baddies arrive.

Shelly begs Eric to help her hide from her mom and the baddies. He uses a shiv that he crafted for some reason, he doesn’t appear to have any reason to make a shiv, no one other than cliche prison guard gives him much trouble, to cut the tiny plastic monitor off of her leg and his leg and they escape through a window. They then jump a razor wire fence and escape back to the city. The forest-prison-coed-rehab-facility is now gone from the movie and no one seems to care that they have escaped other than perhaps the baddies who want to kill Shelly and retrieve her phone with the video evidence.

Back in the city, we have no idea how much time has passed since they’ve met but Eric and Shelly are now in love and start having a lot of sex. They start hanging out with friends as if there is no danger to hide from. They start making music together. Eric was a musician in the original Crow movie but that’s never introduced in this film except when he and Shelly hang out and kind of make a song together. He never mentions being a musician at any point during the movie and even downplays his musical capabilities. Anyway, this is now their story, they make music together. They go to a nightclub where Dom, the video guy, you remember Dom, he’s not been a character in the movie to this point, other than mentions of him making the video, but he’s here now and he tells Shelly that the baddies are searching for her.

This is information that Shelly already has but she reacts as if this is new information. She then tells Eric that they need to leave and he agrees. He wants to know her tragic backstory but she refuses to tell him because she believes that he won’t love her if she tells him. They then return to Eric’s warehouse apartment where they are murdered by suffocation, bags placed over their heads, and their bodies left in the apartment. Shelly goes to hell, I think, and Eric is sent to purgatory, maybe. In purgatory, Eric meets… some guy who tells him that Shelly’s going to hell but Eric can save her by going back to the world of the living and killing the people who killed them. Eric falls into a puddle and wakes up in his warehouse/apartment.

A cop is in the apartment when Eric wakes up but he’s a corrupt cop who works for Roeg. So the cop shoots Eric and then Eric doesn’t die. His bullet wound heals and Eric and the cop fight. Eric is stabbed and shot a couple more times and he doesn’t die and then Eric kills the cop. Then Eric dies again and goes back to purgatory where that guy explains that a crow can take Eric back to the land of the living to kill the people that killed Eric and Shelly and that Shelly can be saved if Eric kills these people. Eric goes into a puddle again and comes back to the world. He’s deeply confused and has no idea what to do other than he needs to kill bad guys. Eric goes to his best friend, a tattoo artist that we may have met in a montage or flashback. He doesn’t have a name but he gives Eric a gun.

Eric then bumbles his way into one of the baddies. He threatens the baddie, the baddie tries to grab a gun and Eric kills him and gets no useful information from him. By chance, the bad guy gets a text message from the other baddies telling him that they have found Dom and they are going to Dom’s address. These baddies are, by chance, right around the corner. So, Eric follows them, shoots at them, gets hit by their car and begins a fight inside the car. He kills one guy, chases the top henchwoman, but she survives when her assistant kicks Eric out of the car and they flee. Eric gets hit by a truck but doesn’t die. Eric goes to find Dom who tells him about the video on Shelly’s phone. This is information that Eric may or may not already have but he somehow doesn’t remember that Shelly showed him her secret hiding place in that apartment she was in earlier. The one where she keeps her phone.

Oh, and, if you are feeling clever and thinking, duh, idiot, the magic Crow is leading him to the bad guys, no, you're wrong. That would make sense as that is how Eric found all of the baddies in the 1994 movie but, no, that doesn't happen in this movie. Yes, there is a badly CGI'd Crow that appears several times but there is no visual clue that the bird is leading Eric anywhere or being helpful in anyway. Eric is never not deeply confused about his situation and only finds the people he needs to find and kill by Deus Ex Text Messages between the various baddies who are always kind enough to text the exact details of their future location.

So, Eric goes and finds the phone and, finally, we see what is in this McGuffin video. To this point, we’ve been told that the video is shocking and incriminating and the baddies are desperate to have it. So, what is in this video? It’s Shelly, under the spell of Roeg, killing a woman we’ve never met and know nothing about. Why would this get Roeg in trouble? It’s just him and three other people witnessing a murder that, from the perspective of anyone who doesn’t know Roeg has supernatural demon powers, is just Shelly committing a cold blooded murder and being comforted by Roeg afterward. He has the cops under his spell so why does this video matter in any way?

I have not mentioned to this point that in Roeg’s subplot, he has acquired the services of a young piano prodigy. He likes listening to her play and getting her to play for him exclusively means a lot to him. Later, he takes her with him when he goes and kills someone but she stays in the car. And then, maybe, it’s not clear, she becomes an opera singer? Maybe? Either that or she just leaves the movie having served no purpose whatsoever. In some universe, I can assume, she’s a replacement for Shelly and the function Shelly served in Roeg’s life until he had her kill someone. I think he had her kill that woman in the video so that he could send that person’s soul to hell as part of his deal with the devil but that’s never shown in the movie so I can only assume that is what happened. Why did he have Shelly kill this woman? Why not just convince her to kill herself like he did to best friend? Why did Shelly have to do it? And why does Shelly having done it threaten Roeg’s nebulous, unexplained place of power in this vague society?

I don’t know and you won’t know either if you see this movie. Anyway, Eric finds the video and briefly questions whether or not he loves Shelly because she’s a stone cold murderer. But she’s not, Roeg made her do it, but Eric’s faith is shaken. Hold on to that, it’s important for some reason. Eric goes back to the tattoo artist’s apartment. He’s still confused and doesn’t know what to do next and is thinking about giving up. But, uh-oh, his friend has betrayed him and called the bad guys. I think, maybe, it’s not clear. Eric is killed and doesn’t heal this time. He goes back to purgatory where that guy from before tells him that because his love for Shelly wavered, it’s no longer pure and he has lost his super powers. He also says that Eric had the power of a God and wasted it but… no, no he didn’t. He had the power to not die but beyond that he had no special skills whatsoever.

Eric begs and pleads and then asks to trade his soul for Shelly’s. She lives and he will go to hell in her place. The guy, who is not God or an Angel, but has some kind of nebulous authority over purgatory and Crow powers, agrees that if Eric goes back to the land of the living again and kills all the baddies, including Roeg, Shelly will get to live and Eric will take her place in hell. He gives Eric the power of black goo that comes out of Eric’s eyes and when Eric wakes up back in tattoo artist’s apartment, he’s now jacked, yoked, muscled up. He fights and kills several baddies and has a cigarette next to his dead friend’s body before Deus Ex-Text Message tells him that Roeg is at the opera. Also, when he wakes up, he doesn't have the black goo around his eyes so he takes some tattoo ink and rubs it on his and around his mouth kind of Joker style.

So, Eric grabs a sword from his dead friend’s collection and goes to enact vengeance. Eric goes to the opera and engages in a gun and sword fight with an endless number of baddies. All the while the sold out opera remains unaware of any of this. Apparently, this opera is louder than your average shooting war. No one notices this. Eric fights his way to Roeg’s assistant. At this point, we’ve seen Roeg dressed in a tuxedo and seemingly seated in his private box at the opera. The pianist girl may or may not be the singer in the opera, I’m not sure. Eric finds Roeg’s assistant and demands to know where Roeg is. She says that Roeg is at his country house. He kills the assistant and her assistant by decapitation. He then carries their heads on stage at the opera and throws the heads into the crowd. Why? I don’t know. None of the people at the opera have any idea who he is or are aware of anything that has happened in this plot. He just wanted to menace and traumatize a bunch of rich people, I guess.

Eric then goes to Roeg’s country house. Roeg is in his PJ’s and is brushing his hair in his lavish bedroom. Eric puts the sword to his throat and Roeg says that he’s an old man, but he’s real and proceeds to cut his own hand on Eric’s sword to prove that he’s… human, I guess. Roeg then tries using his demon power on Eric. Oh, and, he knows about the power of the Crow that Eric now has and he wants to steal it. Roeg is already immortal but, I guess, he also wants the power to be shot or stabbed and not die or whatever. Roeg’s powers don’t work on Eric who ends up tackling Roeg through a mirror which takes them to purgatory. Despite the fact that exposition purgatory guy has said that Roeg ‘walks between worlds,’ Roeg has no idea where he is. Eric kills Roeg and the deal is sealed. Shelly lives and Eric, maybe is going to hell.

Cut to exposition purgatory guy now working as an EMT. He’s in Eric’s warehouse apartment reviving Shelly. She wakes up, Eric is dead next to her. She lives, he’s dead. Movie over. So, we’re back at where they died, the incident that set the Crow part of the movie in motion. Does this mean that nothing of the Crow part of the movie actually happened? Was this a Jacob’s Ladder scenario in which the whole movie was the hallucination of a dying man? Is Eric coming back for a sequel at the end when he walks off into purgatory in a hero shot with a crow on his shoulder? Who the hell knows, I don’t.

There are people who don’t hate this movie. I watched a YouTube video of a young woman who earnestly indicated that she felt the movie wasn’t bad. She appeared to have some magical way of making this nonsense make sense. Other YouTube critics have lavished praise on the remarkable violence in the movie. I found all of the CGI blood and bullet wounds occasionally gross but not the least bit convincing. The bullet wounds don’t really matter as they all heal immediately anyway so there is nothing really at stake when Eric is killing an endless number of nameless henchmen. The violence has been compared to John Wick but that was far more skillfully done than anything in this movie.

And, who cares whether the violence is well done or not. None of this makes any sense. I have explained EVERYTHING that happens in this movie and the only reason it is mildly coherent is because I am leaving out dialogue and scenes that exist but I wasn’t able to remember completely because I was focused on other, seemingly more important nonsense. I’ve never seen a mainstream movie that is this incoherent in plot and motivation. The other night, I was randomly watching the Mystery Science Theater presentation of Manos: The Hands of Fate, a legend among bad movies. Manos: The Hands of Fate makes more sense than The Crow. I promise you, you can follow the action of Manos far more than you can The Crow. Manos is an incompetent mess, but it makes sense in a way The Crow is incapable of. That’s how incompetent The Crow truly is.

The original, 1994 film, The Crow, could not be any easier to follow. While it is lyrical, poetic, and surreal, the narrative proceeds from a specific logic: The love between Eric Draven and his beloved almost-bride, Shelly, is so powerful that when they are murdered by thugs working for a criminal mastermind, Eric is brought back to life by mystical forces who take the form of a crow and lead him on a path of righteous violent revenge. The movie never pauses to explain the crow imagery, Eric’s resurrection, or his power to heal from almost any would. We are asked to simply accept this as reality and we do because Brandon Lee is so compelling and Alex Proyas’s direction creates a remarkable and complete universe.

The Crow 2024 teems with needless lore that makes no sense and serves no purpose. A trailer for The Crow 2024 laid out a rather simple story. Shelly was a sex worker who went to a party with a friend and witnessed something she shouldn’t have. She keeps this a secret from Eric because she’s ashamed and doesn’t want him to get caught up in the mess she’s in. He gets involved anyway and the two of them are killed. He comes back imbued with the power of The Crow and takes vengeance on the bad guys who killed him and Shelly to cover up whatever it was that Shelly witnessed. That would be a clean, complex, and easy to follow story. Eric overcoming his jealousy over Shelly’s past to love her despite her flaws provides a depth to their love story and creates an easy to believe reason for Eric to come back from the dead and kill on Shelly’s behalf. It's also just different from the 1994 movie to avoid accusations of being a rehash.

Instead of that movie, which could have been cobbled together quite easily with a little ADR and the footage that is in this movie, we get a century old villain who made a deal with the devil to get the power to cause other people to kill other people or themselves. He also gets rich and has business or political power of some kind and will live forever like a demon vampire. He kills Shelly to cover up a murder that he caused Shelly to commit. This is a threat to his deal with the devil? Or it’s a threat to his evil business empire that does what? He’s also a high society guy who seeks out the company of talented female musicians because he really loves music.

We have no idea what the timeline of events in this movie is. The editing seems to indicate that Shelly gets the call from her friend, receives the video, her friend is captured, Shelly leaves to find her friend and is then arrested for drugs while being chased. That same day, off screen, she is tried, convicted, sentenced and taken to a forest-rehab-coed prison. Her friend is compelled by the bad guy to kill herself because she doesn’t know where Shelly is. And Shelly and Eric fall in love, Shelly is found by the baddies, escapes prison with Eric and they go back to the City. This happens in a day or maybe three days? A week? Who knows? The movie doesn’t know, so how are we supposed to know?

This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. How this movie was released in this condition and is now being viewed by people with working brains is beyond me. I listened to other critics talk about this movie on YouTube and they found things they liked about it. They appeared unbothered by how none of this makes a lick of sense. They appear blissfully uncaring about the needless lore and the constant ability of everyone to have information that they could not possibly have. Relationships and characters are introduced on a whim and are never commented on or resolved. It’s maddeningly incomprehensible. How are other people experiencing this utter nonsense and not going insane? This review is all that is containing my sanity.

The Crow is the worst movie of 2024. It’s among the worst movies I have ever seen.

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