The Crow: excessive gore can’t hide the bloodlessness of this generic remake

Some movies bear the scars of their own chaotic creation; Rupert Sanders’ long-delayed remake of Alex Proyas’ 1994 cult comic book adaptionThe Crow (itself a movie with a famously morbid production history) climbs up off the operating table and splays its innards out for all to see. Ragged, ugly, and festering around the edges, it’s the cinematic equivalent of an open sore. Leaving aside the fact that the source material feels definitively stuck in the 90s – specifically the proliferation of moody, mall-goth-chic enblematised by Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson – The Crow 2.0 may be the most listless thriller ever made about resurrection. Rising from the dead to avenge the dual murders of himself and his girlfriend at the hands of thugs working for a supernatural Big Bad, Eric Draven (Bill Skarsgard) sulks his way through a series of vigilante set-pieces whose gushing torrents of gore can’t disguise the essential bloodlessness of the entire enterprise.

In truth, it’s not fair to blame Skarsgard – usually an inventive actor with a knack for stylised, genre-friendly performances – for his character’s lack of charisma. The problem is that Eric has been written as a cipher even before his zombification, while his ostensibly tragic romance with fellow musician and tattoo enthusiast Shelley(FKA Twigs) – a good girl gone bad type on the run from a dangerous crowd – is rendered almost entirely in borderline-parodic montage. When the editing settles down long enough for our star cross’d lovers to actually exchange dialogue, all we get are howlers. “What are you reading,” Eric asks at one point. “Rimbaud,” Shelley answers, although sadly we cut away before any of the poet’s lines can be spoken aloud.

Nobody going to see The Crow is expecting Before Sunrise (1995), but for the plot mechanism to work, you have to believe that Eric and Shelley’s devotion is the sort of thing that transcends this mortal coil, that his posthumous sense of loss is enough to rewrite the laws of life and death until further notice. Suffice it to say that the movie not only fails to whip up sufficient passion but that what it puts it in its place is so generic and uninspired that it suggests something even worse than filmmaking by committee – it’s more like filmmaking by A.I. The closest The Crow comes to anything like pleasure is watching Danny Huston, whose character is some sort of Faustian gangster with a fetish for female pianists, try and get through his scenes by giving as little effort as possible. His boredom is palpable; it’s also fair enough.

► The Crow is in UK cinemas now.