The Crow (1994)
It Can't Rain All The Time.
Here to dig up the occasional movie from the past, I return with yet another fun one that people younger than me haven’t always seen and it never fails to somehow surprise me. Like, I don’t know why it comes as a shocker that someone hasn’t necessarily watched a movie older than they are, but here we are anyways. Diverting a bit from rounding out the unseen movies list that people have recommended and returning to terrain I’ve previously tread without a website, let’s see if this one holds up as well as we want it to. Tonight, we watch some folks make a grave mistake -this is The Crow.
The main storyline here is rather simple layered in a more complicated presentation. At the bottom level, it’s a revenge movie. At the top level, it’s a supernatural revenge movie. We don’t waste too much time in the specifics here, but we kick it off with the aftermath of an event that will echo throughout the rest of the movie. Seems someone’s gone and thrown a guy out the window as well as beaten an raped a woman, who then also later dies. A year later, that guy who flew out the window flies out of his grave, and he’s following his little crow friend to all the folks who need to pay for what they did. That’s really it - like I said, it’s pretty simple. Yeah, we don’t really get big into how he came back or anything like that, but those finite details aren’t really needed to enjoy the plot as it goes about. In fact, it’s probably one of the earlier good comic book or superhero style movies that most people didn’t know had anything to do with comics. Just remember that for trivia night - R rated comic-based movies used to be a thing and still pretty good.
As you might guess, with a plot that simple a lot of the intrigue is going to be pulled from the characters, events, and actions going on on the screen. The actors here do a pretty good job with their roles, even if some of them are about as straight-forward as the plot line. More so than any actual levels of acting, this is most remembered as the one that Brandon Lee died in - and that is tragic, but when watching the movie itself try not to let it overshadow everything. He does a fine job here, as does quite a few other characters. At times, if not most times, it can feel perhaps a bit cheesy or over-the-top, but I don’t think this feels out of character for the movie or what it’s going for. Even when our lead stops dropping lines from Edgar Allen Poe it feels poetically appropriate in this setting of dreary, rainy, at times gothic styled city drop. Yes, I don’t think anyone really cares that much about the fact that it’s a raven and not a crow in those verses - it still works quite well. Really, that’s the thing about the acting in this movie - it might not always be good, but it always feels good for entertaining in the way it’s going for.
The characters as far as bad guys go are all largely one-note. They are bad, rowdy, sleezy, and morally opposed to being moral. On the flip side of this, our main and his trio of interactive folks all get some manner of build up to them - be it through flash backs for the dead girlfriend, conversations with the cop, or interactions with the kid. It not only builds them a little, but it does wonders to build up our revenge-zombie of a main character through how he interacts with them, and it paints the picture of tragedy that much more vividly beyond just “bad people did bad things to good folks.” You don’t just want the baddies to get got because they are annoying like you would in some flicks, but more so because the victims feel like they deserve justice. Of course, the pure fact i said the baddies are relatively one note lets you know that not all characters are developed equally, but overall you get enough character that I don’t really think the average person is going to really mind all that much that it’s not characters with ten books of backstory being explained in ten minutes. Some of us might even be thankful of that since it keeps our runtime down and feeling mostly unpadded.
Fire it up!
The movie is a bit older - I mean, the nineties aren’t really that old if you ask me, but with how technology moves it’s worth noting that the movie-scape was pretty different. We do get some cool stuff in here and a bunch of it looks quite good. What I believe is a set of miniatures for the city while we do fly-by shots is quite solid. Some of the compositing shots also look pretty solid, and things like explosions look wonderful. Other times, the effects are quite a bit more noticeable - like the regeneration or a few of the parkour scenes. It’s a mixed bag that happens with films as they age, but for the most part it holds up pretty good as far as the effects department is concerned, and I don’t think most will be taken out of the movie too often by the effects work (at least any more than the material being presented). Visual quality as a whole came off looking a bit better than I thought it would if I was being honest, and I guess in reality the only reason I thought it was going to be worse is how Amazon kept popping up and telling me how it wasn’t going to let me watch it in HD unless I had all sorts of specific stuff going on).
Audio quality is a bit worse off I think. I do see in the dubbing options there’s to selections for enhancing the spoken lines - which I was tempted to pick at one point or another, but given my penchant for always having subtitles on and having seen it before I didn’t really get around to it. The fact they are there is nice though, as if you find the balance to be a bit off (or just the voices are hard for you to hear) then you can turn it up that way - good for devices with limited volume capacity, like my computer. Beyond that, deliveries are good, at times suitably over the top. Music is pretty good in the background as well, sometimes popping up in the foreground for the few moments of the movie that could actually feel like padding out the run time. It does a good job of getting the atmosphere down, particularly with all that constant rain going on. It’s a dark movie, but never so much you can’t see anything - a bit like you’d expect from Tim Burton really. It’s got that dark edge and dark subject, and certainly it’s not a movie for kids - as if the R rating wasn’t obvious enough for that - but it’s also not super overly graphic about things. Yeah, we’ll get a bunch of blood or the likes, but it’s nowhere compared to the levels of stuff you get in modern movies.
Styling in this movie would go on to influence many a Hot Topic client for years to come, if nothing to say for pop culture in general. Corpse paint suddenly became cool for more than just your foreign black metal bands - although probably not as much as trench coats and long hair, right? The movie looks good, and for the time it looked pretty unique too. That bleeding edge of being some modern-esque take on a gothic fairy tale gone wrong bleeds out of it, and sometimes you’ll even catch some extra details on things like a coat still having battle damage from a different scene. It’ll be interesting to see how that remake handles all of the elements and if it still looks or feels unique or not after twenty plus years. For the thinking folks, there is a bunch you could dig into but it’s almost more up to you to do it with this one. You have a good versus evil, some folks want the world to burn, and a somewhat twisted “power of love” here that’s easy enough to pick out. You could also probably go into things like slum life, a city degrading, ineffective police, and that sort of stuff to. For me though, I like to leave it at that surface level making evil pay for it’s mistake from beyond the grave stuff - it’s more my jam. It also makes for a great Ice Nine Kills song.
Setting trends for Hot Topic for years.
It’s a good movie still, held up better than I thought it would to be honest. There are still a few spots where it falters a bit and shows it’s age, but overall the thing is pretty solid. It has some good acting jobs in it, it’s got good enough characters where it counts, and it has some memorable moments and fashion. The movie itself will probably never escape the shadow of it being Lee’s last movie and what we could have gotten had things turned out different in that regard, but it’s still a fine piece to watch and see him do his thing regardless.