When trailers for the upcoming remake of The Crow were unveiled earlier this year, fans of the original 1994 film were left appalled. True enough, the old movie already had some pretty lousy cash-in sequels, but most of those went direct-to-video and were easily ignored. Even three decades later, something about the prospect of rebooting this particular property feels disrespectful to late star Brandon Lee, as if resurrecting his most famous character would disturb his spirit.

Revisiting the film now, however, I honestly have to ask whether The Crow is really so sacrosanct that it can never be remade. Not to say that the remake we actually have on deck looks any good (it doesn’t so far, to my disinterested eyes), but I’m also not sure that the 1994 movie holds up as well as I’d hoped it would.

Title:	The Crow
Year of Release:	1994
Director:	Alex Proyas
Watched On:	4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Available On:	Blu-ray FuboTV Various VOD purchase and rental platforms

At the time of its release, opinions about The Crow were far too clouded by the death of its star. The film was expected to be the breakout role for Brandon Lee (son of the legendary Bruce Lee), who’d previously headlined low-budget action flicks Showdown in Little Tokyo and Rapid Fire and was finally on the cusp of greater mainstream recognition. The news that a tragic accident near the end of production had taken his life at an even younger age than his famous father had died of course created an air of scandal around the movie, but also had the effect of generating far more interest in the picture than it might have gotten otherwise, and propelled it to become a significant box office hit.

I was in my second year of college in 1994, and was so enamored with the movie that I went back to see it in theaters twice – not really for Lee, but more for the flashy and ultra-stylized world-building by director Alex Proyas. My pretentious film school friends and I (to be clear, I’m counting myself in the “pretentious” category there) compared it favorably to other visually ambitious landmarks like Blade Runner and Tim Burton’s Batman, and may have even gone so far as to toss around the word “visionary.” I admit this now with humility and some embarrassment.

Riding the wave of other comic book movies that proliferated in the early 1990s after the success of Burton’s Batman reignited interest in the genre, The Crow is based on a cult underground comic by author James O’Barr. Set in one of those perpetually-rainy, perpetually-nighttime and crime-ridden dystopias so appealing to directors transitioning out of music videos (Proyas had made videos for INXS, Crowded House, Fleetwood Mac, and others), the story concerns a musician named Eric Draven murdered by a gang of thugs on the eve of his wedding, and then resurrected one year later by a magical crow. Clad in all-black leather, painted up in goth makeup, and now virtually indestructible, the new supernatural vigilante sets about on a mission to hunt down and exact violent retribution on those responsible for taking his life and the life of his innocent fiancée.

Looking at it again from a more clinical perspective three decades later, The Crow is a much messier movie than I remembered, and not just because of some obvious last-minute restructuring needed to work around the star’s death. The story is pretty thin, with a lot of bad dialogue and very over-the-top, cartoonish characters. The film really wallows in the seediness, filth, and depravity of the setting, and makes a point of emphasizing that the psychos led by David Patrick Kelly (from The Warriors and Twin Peaks) didn’t just murder Draven’s fiancée, but gang-raped her too. It’s taken to a degree that becomes unpleasant to watch. Jon Polito also has a turn as a sleazy pawn broker. Other villains are played by Tony Todd (Candyman) and the gravel-voiced Michael Wincott (Alien: Resurrection) – all playing less characters than caricatures.

For that matter, Draven himself is kind of an asshole who gets off on taunting and hurting his victims almost as much as they did to him. Sure, I suppose the guy’s entitled to a little payback after what was done to him, but the movie never lets us get to know the man before he was murdered and came back as a spirit of vengeance. To be completely frank here, I’m not entirely sold on Lee’s performance in the role, either. He’s not a terrible actor or anything, but I do think the fact he died while making the movie tends to color one’s perception of just how good he may or may not be in it.

The only genuinely likeable characters are a sympathetic cop played by Ernie Hudson and a young girl named Sarah (Rochelle Davis). The latter’s only narrative purpose for existing in the film is to get kidnapped by the villains so Draven can rescue her. Otherwise, she’s totally superfluous.

Despite Lee’s family pedigree, the action scenes here aren’t especially creative or innovative. They mostly involve variations of the bad guys doing a lot of shooting at him while Lee’s character stands there, invulnerable to their bullets (a very sad irony considering what really happened to the actor) and laughs at them, then takes their guns and shoots them instead.

In other respects, some of Proyas’ stylization holds up and some doesn’t. It largely amounts to a lot of emo posturing, strobe lights, and MTV flash-cut editing, played to an alt-rock soundtrack featuring songs by bands like The Cure, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine, and The Jesus and Mary Chain. Unfortunately, I found myself responding to that less enthusiastically today in middle age than I did as a college sophomore.

The more I think about it, the more I realize The Crow is a young man’s movie – made by young men (Proyas was about 30 during production, and Lee died at 28) for an audience of young men, speaking to their feelings of angst and nihilism and rage. That may have its place, but I guess I’ve aged out of it. I can still appreciate it as an artifact of my youth, but I don’t have the same connection to it I used to.

The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray

The Crow was first released on Blu-ray back in 2011 by Lionsgate. That disc scored some decent reviews at the time, but I never owned or watched it. The new 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray edition comes from Paramount. Frustratingly, the studio has chosen to only sell the movie as a single-disc 4K UHD with no accompanying standard Blu-ray, which means that I had to resort to taking screenshots from the Digital Copy, and they all came out too soft. Rest assured that the actual 4K disc looks better than the images on this page.

That noted, the movie always had budget and production limitations, and the photography is inundated with optical effects that are more exposed than ever in 4K resolution. I’m not sure that the 1.85:1 image ever really screams of 4K detail, but it’s acceptably sharp.

This is a famously dark movie, and HDR really helps to resolve the different layers of darkness so that detail isn’t lost on the hero’s black costume as he skulks through the shadows in the middle of the night. Bright highlights also pop nicely, and colors (what few of them there are beyond black and black upon more black) are rich.

I have mixed feelings about the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack. The sound mix has a lot of bass, and most of it’s pretty loud, but it rarely extends too deeply. Explosions are weak. My impression of the track overall is that it sounds a little too sterile.

The majority of bonus features appear to be carried over from older video editions, including an audio commentary by director Alex Proyas, an ancient EPK behind-the-scenes featurette, a profile of comic author James O’Barr, some extended and deleted scenes, and a trailer. A second audio commentary featuring producer Jeff Most and screenwriter John Shirley may be new (or at least it doesn’t seem to have been on the Lionsgate Blu-ray).

Paramount offers two different 4K SteelBook editions of The Crow, one that went to general retail and one exclusive to Walmart. Although I’m normally a SteelBook collector, I didn’t care for the artwork on either one (seriously, who thought the dominant color for this movie should be white?) and opted for the basic keepcase option instead.

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Note: All screenshots on this page were taken from the streaming edition of the film grabbed off a web browser and are used for illustration purposes only.