THE CROW remake reviews are tearing the film apart

The crow the remake is finally out in theaters, and it’s getting absolutely trashed by critics and audiences alike. I mean, we all knew this movie was going to be terrible after the first trailer came out, and now everyone is proving that making this movie was a waste of money and talent.

The film currently has a 19% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with many calling it “soulless,” “lifeless,” and “empty.”

If anyone would like to try to tell this story of The crow once again, they need to make sure it’s a great movie, something that can be considered better than the original, otherwise, what’s the point of remaking it!?

I was supposed to see this movie this weekend, but I’m not sure I want to spend my money on it.

Below I have included a collection of excerpts from the reviews

Richard Crouse: The Crow is back, but unfortunately, it never really takes off. For a movie about soulmates, and with a villain who condemns souls to hell, the new film feels soulless.

Roger Moore: It never gets past the general heartlessness that permeates even the abrupt romance that supposedly starts and drives it.

Felix Vasquez Jr.: “The Crow” is a maddening film. Lionsgate still has no idea what to do with it; it’s a story that would make waves, especially in today’s social climate.

Michael Gingold: For an unnecessary remake like this, following a trio of less-than-successful sequels to the 1994 original, a dead horse might not be the best image to start with.

Fico Cangiano: A big flop. Pretty boring – drags on for the first 40 minutes and features unlikable characters with empty motivations. Also, marred by weak acting – with the lead character channeling Anakin’s acting from the Star Wars prequels.

Andrew Parker: The Crow takes a familiar concept and turns it into one of the most ponderous, sparkless, and boring “superhero” origin stories ever adapted to film. It makes every wrong decision along the way and manages to be just as bad as all the sequels…

William Bibbiani: When you stifle the emotional simplicity of a story like The Crow to emphasize the plot, the plot has to make sense. And it doesn’t. It has baffling rules and a vague chronology and nothing seems to matter anymore.

Kristy Puchko: Ugly, incoherent, and ultimately cynical, The Crow evokes words of wisdom from another horror film about rampaging corpses: Sometimes it’s better to be dead.

Lyvie Scott: It’s almost ironic how such a profound concept can be undermined by a lack of material.

Witney Seibold: Thanks to sloppy editing and a general lack of basic narrative acumen, events unfold without much explanation, emotional resonance, or, in some scenes, basic communication… dull, lifeless, [and] nonsense.”

Ryan Lattanzio: The Crow isn’t a waste of talent or resources; worse, he just hangs there on the screen, as undead as Eric himself.

Tim Grierson: Brandon Lee’s original was hard to shake due to his untimely passing. This forgettable new version not only fails to honor his memory, but never quite justifies its existence on its own merits.

Esther Zuckerman: A truly baffling film. I mean this in a general way: how did Hollywood struggle for decades to revive this property and end up with such a mediocre product?

Aaron Neuwirth: With little stylization, a generic plot that removes much of what at least made the original comics great, and a clear sense of “why watch this when I can watch that,” this is less of a bird that got away and more of a bad egg overall.

David Rooney: The Crow is a dark, slow, overly serious film that never takes off.

Benjamin Lee: The Crow 2.0 is a total disaster, with its head in its hands, an incoherent plot and a sloppy execution, destined to go down in the annals of the worst and most pointless remakes ever made.

Barry Hertz: Incoherent and vulgar, with its aesthetic sensibilities seemingly copied from a “John Wick goes goth” pitch, Sanders’ version of The Crow is truly awful to sit through.

Then there’s this review a friend sent me from Ltterbooxed that I thought I’d post. It was written by FrozenIIFan2004:

“I know this movie is still under embargo, but since I’m not a certified film critic, damn it, I’ll give my full opinion on it, since it came out today in my country.

“I went to see this movie wanting to give it a chance and hoping to enjoy it, but I left pissed. The Crow (2024) was a complete piece of crap and the people who suspected this movie was doomed from the start were right.

“In fact, this is the worst comic book movie of 2024 without a doubt. This makes Madame Web look like Deadpool and Wolverine by comparison. At least Madame Web had decent characters, which I can’t say about this movie. And at least Madame Web is somewhat memorable.

“Just an hour into watching this movie as I write this, I have already forgotten a lot of things that happened in this movie because of how bland, soulless, lame and boring it is. The fact that it is boring as hell is the main reason why this movie sucks. It is so boring that it makes you wonder what kind of movie you are watching.

“There is such a lack of action here. There are a couple of scenes in the third act that involve shooting and killing, but there are only 2 major action scenes in this entire movie and both of the action scenes I am talking about were shown in the trailer and have their own clips as well. Those two action scenes were the only redeeming quality in this movie, especially the opera scene which was downright awesome.

“The other violent scenes that weren’t “action” scenes were actually pretty good, especially the blood. But those action scenes, even the purely violent ones, were all in the third act of the movie. It didn’t feel like a Crow movie, much less a comic book movie. It felt more like a fucking melodrama.

“The first act of the movie focuses on the love story between Eric and Shelly, whose chemistry isn’t even good to begin with. There’s this whole backstory about how they met. You couldn’t care less about that. 45 minutes into the movie is where the real story of The Crow begins, where Eric and Shelly “die” but then Eric comes back to life. You might think that’s where the action starts, right? Wrong!

“The second act of the movie is basically Eric talking to this wise man who tells him to kill the people who killed him and Shelly and then he finds the people who killed them. The pacing of the movie is so slow it’s unbearable. One of the slowest comic book movies I’ve ever seen! The story is nothing like the original in a way that it’s not the good kind of different.

“It doesn’t understand the source material to the point where it felt like an insult not only to the comics but to the original film and in particular to Brandon Lee’s death. The ending of the film literally makes a stupid decision that misses the plot point in the source material.

“Bill Skarsgard gave a decent performance, but it felt like the kind of performance you’d expect from a B-list actor, not an A-list actor. The other performances were forgettably bland. Even Danny Houston, the other A-list actor in the film, gave a really weak performance as the film’s villain.

“The villain was so forgettable, mostly because he was almost never in the movie. The movie didn’t have the dark tone that the original had and instead went for a more normal directing style. It just felt dark. And the soundtrack… WTF was that?!

“Overall, The Crow (2024) is a disgrace to the original film that stripped away everything fans loved about the film in favor of another soulless, money-hungry reboot that no one asked for. The action scenes are solid, but it’s a slow, boring mess.

“Say what you will about Borderlands, Lionsgate’s previous film, but at least that film had some life and provided enough fun action scenes and memorable characters. This film can go straight to the sewers!”

In the film: “Soulmates Eric Draven (Skarsgård) and Shelly Webster (FKA Twigs) are brutally murdered when the demons of her dark past catch up with them. Given the chance to save his true love by sacrificing himself, Eric sets out on a journey to seek ruthless vengeance on their killers, spanning the worlds of the living and the dead to right what was wrong.”

This version of the film stars Bill Skarsgårdsinger/actor FKA twigs, Danny Houston (30 days of darkness), Laura Birn (Foundation), Sami Bouajila (A son), AND Jordan Bolger (The woman king).