Hey folks, Harry here with Chat Goddess, GrendelKhan's look at CROW 3: SALVATION. And from the sound of it... it's pretty awful, of course... everyone comes away from a film with a different take, but this film... well it's been in trouble ever since Rob Zombie left the helm. I so wanted to see his take on THE CROW, but... alas.... We'll have to wait for THE HOUSE OF A 1000 CORPSES to see if Zombie will emerge into a cinemagenius or not. Till then... here's Grendypoo and her spoiler filled depressing look at a franchise that... I can't look at and not see Brandon Lee... and wish... well, that things had gone differently... I so wanted him to play Peter Parker.... sigh....
Crow 3: Salvation.... -some things are better left dead
by: GrendelKhan
major spoilers alert!
Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Eric Mabius, William Atherton, Fred Ward, and Grant Shoud. .
I want to preface this with a note that I own the orignial Caliber Press issues of the Crow and I love them. I really like the poetry and violence of them. The use of the songs and the stark black and white of the images, was very well done and you could tell that this was written by someone who really felt this kind of tragedy close to the heart. It was one of the first b/w comics that didn't somehow look amateur to me.
That said, here's The Crow 3: Salvation to come along to totally lose all that initial, tragic magic of the first one. We'll not even go into Crow 2: City of Angels here, it would take too long and leave me exhausted.
This movie has a love of the color yellow like I had not seen since Lars Von Trier's "The Element of Crime", overused and badly done colors and too damn dark. The opening shot is a crowd outside cheering on the killing of a convict in the state prision. There are homemade signs with a pretty young woman and "Remember the Victim" on them. A limo pulls up and a sad looking Dunst and Atherton get out and are ushered to the gate of the prision, while eager reporters are in their faces, it's disorenting and shot WAAAYYY to dark and dreary, and did I mention yellow? Turns out, the victim was Erin's (Dunst's) sister, and she and Atherton (the father) are there to watch the excution of the killer.
Alex Corvus is convicted and is about to die for stabbing his girlfriend 53 times. Shoud is the "killer's" lawyer, deterimined to get the guy who did this, but yet is so unbelievable as someone who fought for Alex as his lawyer. Maybe you're supposed to infer that he was given the case later, after the trial, since you just know by what a good guy he is, that there's no way we could let this innocent man get killed. (sarcasm here) Alex had all along blamed the savage murder on a man with a scarred arm a la The Fugitive, one that the police deny exsists and never made any effort to find. The two men, Mabius and Shaud are playing one last chess game in his cell as the guard comes to take him to the chamber to be excecuted. As they strap him into the chair in the unnamed state pen, the guard puts a wierd fetishy mask/helmet on him to electrocute him. He looks into the room where the witnesses are, someone shows a jacket sleeve raised to show a chevron-like series of raised scars, only to him, just as lightning hits the transformer and he sizzles and burns at too high a tempature. But seeing that scarred arm, is enough for him to want to come back and avenge himself, and his beautiful girlfriend.
When the bad fisheye-cam starts zooming thru the city, I'd completly forgotten that thay was what the crow-vision was supposed to be, I thought it was just bad camera work. There's no sense of time lapse from when he's killed and wakes up in the morgue in the prison, and the crow shows him what to do., i.e. pull his charred skin off and reveal the amazingly accurate lines in black on his face and show the black lipstick underneath. Right there, in a diamectrially opposed view of "You had me at hello" I thought, "Oh, now you've lost me..."
Can I mention that I feel that Dunst, who showed such promise in Interview with the Vampire and even recent (ish) episodes of ER, not only seems to be phoning her performance in, but I think she was actually emailing it in? Or is that too harsh? Atherton has always played the heavy reliably for years and I loved him (of course) in Real Genius, but you can see he's not the overly sad father a mile away. I thought that Sam Neil had the emotional detactment thing down, but he's still in the running with this performance. Eric Mabius, who I haven't seen in anything else that I remember offhand, I could tell he seemed to want this to work, and be a powerful story of love and vengance, but he dosen't quite pull it off. Ward was looking more and more like Nathan Arizona as the movie progressed, and his performance was akin to that. Overacting is fine in a movie like Raising Arizona, but here, it's just too much.
The new Crow has psychokenetic powers in that he can pick items up or touch something and get a reading off of it, and this ability stretches to the limits the suspension of disbelief that I go into a movie like this with. For example, he "reads" the knife that killed his girlfriend after it's been in a locked evidence room for the past three years, or the handrail on a set of stairs that she once walked on, years ago, despite the fact the others have been walking there since that time. Maybe it's just supposed to be that since he's sensitive to her "emanations" that he can read them so well.
During an emotional confrontation scene between the Erin and Alex, the top part of the screen was filled wonderfully with a nice large grey boom mic. It was nearly as bad as Surviving The Game.
And Fred Ward, as the Police Captian.... well I guess the Tremors money is just not coming in like it used to. It turns out that the four detectives on the case had formed a secret partnership with Atherton's character, and the acronym of the company was from the first letter of each detective's last name, hence: D.E.R.T (yes, the symbolisms are enough to choke a horse here...) The girlfriend had discovered something bad about the cops, whose money came from bascally live internet porn and drugs, and so they chased her down and killed her, a lot. I know, that's like saying someone's a little bit pregnant, but really, she runs away, gets captured, shoots one cop in the foot fer cryin' out loud, and he stabbs her 53 times?!?!? That's getting killed a lot.
There's much more I could rant about here, like how Ward's Captain knows that a Crow symbol is indicative of someone back from the dead (what?!?!), and that he's into creepy taxidermy and strange rituals and shamanism of some sort. He also has a disturbing girl of his own ( a la that creepy asian chick in the first one, completly unecessary there as well as here), or how no one really seems surprised at the guy back from the dead bits, although, strangely enough, NOT ONE of the people who saw him get excecuted realizes who he is at first, and when they do, it's like "Oh, here's Alex, back from the dead." The sister, Erin, finds out that the father was in cahoots with the cops, runs out of the house, and the Captian comes in like 5 minutes later and has somehow magically determined that "she knows" and something must be done about that. When, in the climactic fight scene Ward basically brainwashes Alex into thinking maybe he did kill the girl in the first place, and that he's a pathetic loser all his life it's just too much for me to take. I mean, really, WHY would someone come back from the dead (or be given a second chance) if he'd REALLY killed his love?
Overall, the movie had too many closeups of fight scenes (can't anyone shoot fights like those HK guys?) and too muddled of a story for me even to care about the characters. You only ever see the girlfriend in flashback, and there's not really a sense of connection as to why he would go through all of this for her. It was a very watered down version of a good movie (which I still have some problems with) and a great comic. It's a shame to see the Crow come to such an end, I'd even prefer to see some of the spin-off comics made into a movie, but I think when this one comes out, it will kill the franchise as effectively as Batman and Robin did in the hearts and minds of true fans everywhere.
Grendy
