‘The Crow’ movie review: Bill Skarsgård, FKA Twigs drown in this blunder of epic proportions 

The Crow reboot lacks chemistry, slow-paced with flat characters, and gratuitous violence, failing to capture the essence of the original

Remember the missing trigger warning in Blink Twice? Well, The Crow has a trigger warning, but it is the wrong one. The Crow should have come with a warning for toe-curling dialogue and flat characters sharing zero chemistry. Based on James O’Barr’s comic book series and Alex Proyas gorgeous 1994 film, this needless reboot directed by Rupert Sanders (he directed the Foundation pilot!) moves at the pace of congealing gum at a deserted post office.

The Crow, the fifth film in the franchise, begins with a dying horse (black marks for animal violence). The horse is caught in barbed wire and a young boy attempts to set it free. The traumatised boy Eric (Bill Skarsgård) grows up struggling with addiction; meanwhile a pianist, Shelly (FKA Twigs) also struggles with addiction. When her friend Zadie (Isabella Wei) sends her a video, Shelley goes on the run from Roeg (Danny Huston), a patron of the arts and a crime lord, who has made a deal with the devil.

Shelly is sent to rehab by cops where she meets Eric, and when Marian (Laura Birn), Roeg’s right-hand person, lands up at the rehab, the two flee. They hang out at Shelley’s friend’s ritzy apartment and fall in love as they party the nights away... until Roeg’s henchmen find the two and kill them. Eric wakes up in an abandoned train station and meets Cronos (Sami Bouajila) who tells him he is in a purgatory-style halfway house and as long as his love remains pure, he is invincible. Once he dispatches the wicked, he can be reunited with his one true love. And so the snail-paced rampage of revenge begins.

The production design is excellent. The soundscape, even when not compared to the 1994 movie, which featured Stone Temple Pilots, The Cure and Nine Inch Nails, is trippy. But that is really all one say about this glacially-paced movie. The operatic violence at the climax — in case one misses the point, it is intercut with an opera — is gratuitous.

Twigs and Skarsgård have no chemistry at all, making it impossible to invest in their love. There is no sense of love lasting through ages and it seems like they are hanging out with each other for convenience more than anything else. The leaden dialogues do not help either. The sluggish pace and jumbled plot, with the all-important video popping up as a filler cannot move things along.

The crow, which has associations to ancestors and rebirth in Hindu myth as well, seemed bunged on as an afterthought, floating about vaguely in the frame, as one of many pointless characters, along with Shelley’s mum Sophia (Josette Simon) and a nameless pianist whose only part in the proceedings is to make goo-goo eyes at Roeg. There was a moment during a chase scene when the regenerating Eric brought a Gothic Terminator to mind. It was, alas, quickly revealed to mirage in this wasteland of imagination.

The Crow is currently running in theatres