Review: The Crow

       The Crow will always be remembered as the film in which Brandon Lee was accidentally killed during filming. Brandon Lee was the son of martial arts film legend Bruce Lee, and The Crow was his first major movie in a leading role. Lee died as a result of a bullet getting lodged in the barrel of a gun, which was later loaded with blank rounds. When the blank charges were fired, the explosion caused the bullet to fire out of the gun. The manner of Lee's death is as eerie as it is ironic. Lee's character Eric Draven comes back from the dead, and cannot be killed. He is even shown being shot numerous times, only to have his wounds heal a la Wolverine. What's eerie about Lee's death is that his father's final film Game of Death predicted Brandon Lee's death 20 years earlier. In Game of Death, Bruce Lee plays an actor who is accidentally shot during filming. Putting Lee's death aside, The Crow is actually a pretty cool movie, and shows Brandon Lee's potential to be a successful action star.

       The Crow is based on a 1989 comic book by the same name. The premise is basically, “what if there was a goth superhero?” Lee plays Eric Draven, an up and coming rock singer who was murdered along with his fiance on Halloween Eve. A year after his death, Draven rises from the grave and seeks to avenge his fiance's death. How Draven comes back to life isn't entirely clear, all we're given is a voiceover at the beginning of the film that states that sometimes when a soul is so restless, it is returned to earth by a crow so it can finish it's business. Draven now has super powers, he is invulnerable and can vanish into thin air. He's also a skilled fighter, but Draven may have been like that before he died, there's nothing supernatural about that. Draven hunts down all of his fiance's murderers, which upsets the crime boss all of them worked for, and he comes after Draven. Draven receives help from a policeman played by Ernie Hudson (yes, the black guy from Ghostbusters). It's a cool superhero movie which was something of an anomaly before the superhero movie boom in the early 2000s.

       Lee is the center of this movie, every other character either serves to help him or get beaten down by him. His acting is excellent, so it's sad to know that his career was cut so short. Visually, the film is impressive, using a blend of miniatures, special effects, and full sized sets to create a darkly, gothic cityscape reminiscent of the Los Angeles from Blade Runner, or the Gotham of Tim Burton's Batman. The prevalent use of in camera effects is very refreshing in todays world of superhero movies that are more CGI than anything else. The soundtrack is also wall-to-wall rock, with bands like The Cure, Stone Temple Pilots, and Nine Inch Nails, fitting perfectly with the goth superhero theme. Before 2000s X-Men, quality movies based on comic books were few and far between, if they existed at all (it depends on your view of Burton's Batman movies). The scene in which Lee is killed is appropriately left out of the film, but I think that they made the right call to release the movie. There was talk about shelving The Crow, but I'm glad they didn't. At least what Brandon Lee accomplished, in what looks like a hard, dedicated labor, has been preserved.