After what seems like 800 different incarnations of star and director over the past twenty years, a Crow remake is really, seriously, actually coming out in a few months. Yes, really! They filmed it and edited it and everything! It’s a real movie, with a real trailer! That alone deserves some kind of praise, since a new Crow movie seemed like one of those cursed projects that would never (sorry) take flight.
But once upon a time, it was actually pretty easy to make a follow-up to the much-loved, tragedy-haunted 1994 film starring the late Brandon Lee, despite the fact that it seemed like a bad idea considering what happened during its production. The Crow: City of Angels was released just a little over two years after the first film hit theaters, featuring an entirely new cast and only a few returning crew members (most notably composer Graeme Revell and production designer Alex McDowell).
Thankfully, they didn’t try to continue the story of Eric Draven. In fact, on paper, it seemed like a good way to make a follow-up without ruining his character OR betraying the spirit of Lee. The sequel simply focused on a different person who was resurrected by the mysterious bird in an effort to “set the wrong things right.” The lone connection to the first film was the character of Sarah, now ten years older and played by Mia Kirshner, as a guide/potential love interest for Vincent Perez’s new hero, Ashe Corven.
Unfortunately, the film didn’t find nearly as much love from fans or critics. Despite the new character and slightly different motive (a single father avenging his son as opposed to a man avenging his fiancé), the way things play out is exactly the same: our undead hero paints himself up, puts on a trenchcoat, and takes down the four colorful villains who murdered him and his loved one before setting his sights on their crime lord boss (who has a creepy oracle guiding his decisions and also (spoiler) is impaled in the climax). Even the location change didn’t help much; it was Los Angeles instead of Detroit, but the decaying streets and crumbling buildings all looked more or less the same.
And being a mid-’90s Dimension film, meant it was also reworked by the Weinstein brothers, who took it away from director Tim Pope and had it re-edited to be even MORE of a copy of the original. However, as is often the case (if not, I wouldn’t have much to write about every month), the novelization reflects the original shooting script as opposed to the final edit, offering us a chance to see how the film would have played out if the villainous brothers had left Pope and screenwriter David S. Goyer alone.
Apart from the usual “cut the talky stuff to get to the next action scene quicker” snips (or outright chops in some cases), most of the Weinsteins’ overhauls came in the last half hour or so. In the final cut, Curve (Iggy Pop) and Kali (Thuy Trang) attack Sarah’s coworker in an attempt to find out where she lives, but the man refuses, and they kill him anyway.
In the film, right after he dies, it cuts to Curve, now in an unexplained state of duress, taking off into the night and leaving Kali there. Then they show Kali and two goons kicking in Sarah’s door with no explanation of how they found her, followed immediately by Ashe arriving at Sarah’s place seemingly moments later, even though Sarah has already been taken away (with Kali remaining behind hoping for this very showdown). It’s very jumpy and confusing, though the novel makes more sense of it.
As it should have played out, after killing the poor coworker, Curve and Kali trash the office until they find some business papers with Sarah’s address. But at this point, the tattoo of a crow on Curve’s chest (a recurring plot point that is barely glimpsed in the theatrical cut) starts to bleed, which is why he suddenly freaks out and leaves. Why they would leave in his reaction without the setup is a mystery only the Weinsteins can answer, but they have other things to worry about now.
Anyway, Curve’s increasingly frantic state catches Ashe’s attention out in the city, and they have their big motorcycle chase as seen in the film. But only after this sequence does Ashe get the sense that something is wrong at Sarah’s and head there, finding Kali and realizing his friend had been taken to Judah’s. For whatever reason (keeping Iggy Pop around longer, I assume), they jumbled up this 15-minute chunk of Pope’s original cut to make Kali’s death come first.
Since she was the one who actually fired the fatal shot into Ashe’s son, saving her for the last of the four would have been more poetic. But by swapping it around and having Ashe just go to Sarah’s out of nowhere and encounter Kali first, it not only hurts the story of his personal vendetta but also the low-key love story between him and Sarah, as he doesn’t seem to be too concerned that she had been kidnapped since he now goes after Curve in between discovering Sarah was taken and doing anything about it.
Kali’s death was also changed; it was originally much darker and deserving of such a terrible person. Both versions have her and Ashe fight until he knocks her out of the second-story window to the street below, but originally, she was meant to survive her fall instead of dying instantly.
As someone who was obsessed with death, her ultimate goal was to experience it for herself, so after surviving the fall, she begs Ashe to finish her off. Realizing that she WANTED to die, Ashe decides he’d almost be doing her a kindness to do so, and instead leaves her on the street to suffer and die slowly. A bit harsh for the hero of a movie, perhaps, but an interesting moment that the story could have benefited from.
And the ending is completely different, sending us out on a huge downer. In the final cut, Ashe is encouraged by a vision of his dead son to help Sarah (still being held by Judah), at which point they can be together. Sarah is killed in the process, but we get the idea that the three of them will be together in the afterlife, which is a relatively happy note. But originally, Danny pleaded with Ashe NOT to help her, saying that he was there to work for the dead, not the living, and if he continued his rescue efforts, he would miss his chance to be reunited with him in that next place.
As painful as it is to him, Ashe can’t bring himself to let Sarah die, ignoring his son’s warnings. So, like in the final version, he still fails to save her, but now it’s worse, as he is doomed to be trapped in limbo for eternity. I can’t say I totally disagree with the decision to change this, as the movie is already bleak enough, but as someone who believes in the whole “if you seek revenge, dig two graves” mentality, I think I would ultimately prefer this ending, as it abides by this idea.
Most of the other changes in the novelization are, perhaps, Williamson’s invention. Goyer’s script is available online, and most of the things in the book that aren’t in the movie are also reflected there. Outside of internal thoughts (more on those soon), the only other additions of note that don’t seem to originate with Goyer are a pair of observers during the climactic Day of the Dead sequence, watching Judah torture and hang Ashe while assuming that it’s all a staged stunt show (“This stunt guy is really good!” one of them thinks as Judah breaks Ashe’s fingers), and an extra little bit of action when Ashe is climbing Judah’s tower, as a pair of Judah’s anonymous goons attempt to stop him by climbing after him.
However, the internal thoughts are almost certainly Williamson’s own, as there is no apparent way the information would be conveyed on screen without the characters just monologuing out of nowhere. We get some more development for the villains, in particular Nemo, played by Thomas Jane in one of his first major roles.
In one of the film’s few highlights, he is killed while pleasuring himself at a coin-operated strip show, but Williamson adds a bit of tragedy to why he frequented the place by explaining that Nemo was a virgin by choice after losing two family members to AIDS. In all its attempts to copy the first movie, one area in which it really dropped the ball is giving the villains any kind of personal lives or even basic identifying traits outside of their names, so the novel at least gives us a little more to chew on for these people.
And for OG fans, we learn more about how Sarah ended up here after the events of the first film. Some of it is just in her own thoughts, but there was meant to be a scene (it was shot and removed) where Sarah tells Ashe about her mother, Darla, who stayed clean for a bit only to relapse, with Sarah coming home one day to find her dead of an OD. Ashe, in turn, would tell Sarah about Danny’s mother, an addict who met a similar fate–the common tragedy helping to strengthen the growing bond between these two broken people.
One could argue that the movie should have been about Sarah all along, but at least the book version doesn’t do her as dirty as she was done by the feature, as nearly all of her character moments were either reduced or removed entirely.
So, if you are one of those rare fans of Ashe Corven’s adventure, the novelization is the better depiction of it for sure. Even with the more depressing ending (and without the scene of him retrieving his son’s body and giving it a proper burial, something that was apparently added late as it’s not in the book or Goyer’s online draft), it’s a more fully realized narrative with far more explanations for both the villains’ actions and Sarah’s.
But if you downright hated it, there’s not enough to change your mind, I suspect—it’s still just a retread of the first film’s events, sorely lacking the humanity that made the first film so memorable (there is no Ernie Hudson equivalent this time around), and even if it had an incredible script, it would still be nearly impossible to escape the tragic shadow hanging over it and every other Crow project that’s come along since.
