By The reviews are in for “The Crow” reboot and it looks like “Borderlands” may have a competitor for the worst film of the year.
The latter video game adaptation famously first landed a 0% Rotten Tomatoes score before clawing its way up to a final score of 10% as more reviews were added.
With 24 reviews counted, the new “The Crow” sits at just 13% (4.4/10) and reviewers aren’t impressed with director Rupert Sanders’ new take on the 1994 action/supernatural classic.
It’s a similar story on Metacritic where it stands at 29/100 – just two ahead of “Borderlands” at 27/100. Both films have been distributed by Lionsgate so it’s a double whammy for the distributor.
Here’s a sampling of review quotes:
“The Crow isn’t bad — and it gets better as it goes — but it’s an exercise in folly. It cannot escape Lee and the 1994 original even as it builds a more allegorical scaffolding for the smartphone generation.” – Mark Kennedy, Associated Press
“Though Mr. Skarsgård is gravely charismatic and FKA twigs is touching, the dour, depressing dankness of Mr. Sanders’s vision makes The Crow a turkey.” – Kyle Smith, The Wall Street Journal
“The real problem comes down to script and execution, along with a failure to tackle that one big question all reboots really ought to answer: Why this story, and why now? Why did we need a new take on The Crow, after all these years?” – Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence
“The Crow 2.0 is a total, head-in-hands disaster, incoherently plotted and sloppily made, destined to join the annals of the very worst and most pointless remakes ever made.” – Ben Lee, The Guardian
“It doesn’t take long to realize that what was meant to be a franchise-starter is, unlike its hero, permanently DOA.” – David Fear, Rolling Stone
“The film may insist that Eric and Shelly’s is a grand romance of soul mates, but what it actually gives us is a burnout-detention boyfriend/rebellious-cheerleader girlfriend dynamic that doesn’t feel like it would last a long weekend.” – Alison Wilmore, Vulture
“The remake gets bogged down by a superfluous, hackneyed backstory and narrative threads that are conspicuous for their lack of emotional gravitas, causing the film to feel like a wheel-spinning exercise.” – Derek Smith, Slant Magazine
“The original Crow is by no means a perfect film — its dialogue is often corny, its sentimentality heavy-handed — and I don’t believe the comics are so sacred that they can never be adapted again. But Sanders’s vision is just dull.” – Shirley Li, The Atlantic
“A genuinely perplexing film. I mean that on a broad level: How did Hollywood struggle for decades to reboot this property and end up with such a lackluster product?” – Esther Zuckerman, Bloomberg
“The Crow” is in cinemas Friday.
The post “The Crow” Reboot Reviews Are In appeared first on Dark Horizons.
