Rupert Sanders’ attempt to resurrect the 1994 cult revenge thriller has become one of 2024’s most atrocious films
There are different types of bad movies. There are those that find an unintended audience after the fact, reframing them as sources of amusement to be ridiculed, those that are simply too dull to be thought of ever again and then there are those that are made with such staggering incompetence that they barely even exist. The latter category is the one that I find hardest to endure, films such as The Snowman (a head-scratchingly awful thriller that was technically unfinished yet still released) veering from bad to refund-level unwatchable.
It was no real surprise that a tortured update of 1994’s cursed goth revenge thriller The Crow would be a misfire – it’s been in development since 2008 with multiple directors and actors attached ever since – but it’s genuinely startling just how utterly wretched the finished product is and how unfit it is for a wide release. Filmed two years ago and dumped on a low-expectation late summer weekend, 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.