THE CROW: CITY OF ANGELS
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Vincent Perez, Mia Kirshner, Richard Brooks, Iggy Pop. Screenplay: David S. Goyer. Director: Tim Pope. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
The advertising campaign for THE CROW: CITY OF ANGELS invites us to "Believe in the power of another," but it sounds more like a plea for sympathy. After all, what are you supposed to do when you want to make a sequel but the star of the first film is no longer with us? Well, I suppose the obvious answer -- swallow your checkbook and allow THE CROW to rest in peace -- was unacceptable, but this is one sequel which seemed utterly doomed from the first minute. 1994's THE CROW was a film with a striking look, but it owed virtually every ounce of emotional resonance it had to the tragic death of star Brandon Lee while filming the scene in which his character is killed. CITY OF ANGELS has no such back story to prop up its re-tread of the first film, and seems determined to substitute excess for emotion in what has to rank as one of the year's most grueling cinematic ordeals.
The setting is the near future in the City of Angels, where a drug lord named Judah Earl (Richard Brooks) controls all. It is the misfortune of a mechanic named Ash (Vincent Perez) and his young son to witness a gang of Judah's thugs murdering someone, and they in turn are murdered as well. But a little thing like death can't keep Ash down, not when he becomes one with the vengeance-minded spirit of The Crow. He befriends a tattoo artist named Sarah (Mia Kirshner), but he has little time to spend on relationships. His mission is to find the people responsible for his son's death -- including Judah himself -- and destroy them so that his soul might find peace.
If there is anyone you should really feel sorry for in this mess, it is Vincent Perez, because I don't think he ever had a chance. This isn't like Val Kilmer stepping into Batman's boots, or Pierce Brosnan taking over as 007; it's more like someone trying to replace Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard. THE CROW's fans are passionate about the film, and in particular about the man they see as headed towards stardom before he was cut down in his prime. Perez has the right look for the part -- he looks serviceably eerie in The Crow's face paint and leather duster -- but he's not Brandon Lee. That's not even a criticism, because I'm not convinced Lee was anything that special. The point is that those who come to this film because they loved THE CROW are going to have a real problem with this guy with a French accent taking over for their hero.
Then again, I suppose Perez always could have said no, especially once he got a look at a script which has him making his entrance emerging from a fountain of water in tattered clothes looking like Esther Williams on the way to a rave. There is plenty of silliness like that in CITY OF ANGELS (it tries to stake a claim to mytho-poetic status by including a Tiresias-like blind seer), but mostly it is an empty recycling of THE CROW. The radical switch involves having the dead man avenging a son rather than a lover, but otherwise it simply finds a different leather-clad fellow killing his own killers one by one, and oh, the time and energy exerted on finding creative methods of inflicting pain. The bill of fare in CITY OF ANGELS includes a hypodermic needle jammed up a nose, a tattoo needle applied to the eyeball, eyes gouged out, and even a tortured crow (don't worry, no animals were harmed in the making of this film). It's a resolutely ugly film director Tim Pope has put together, heavy on gratuitous S&M but light on any semblance of a point. Sarah (we assume this is the skate-punk from the first film all grown up) serves only to give us the lovely Mia Kirshner to look at, and Pope appears far more concerned with serving up candle-wax-on-the-nipples than creating characters.
There are plenty of individual reasons to avoid CITY OF ANGELS (though Iggy Pop makes an ideal villain for The Crow since he looks like a corpse himself), but it's much simpler to explain why each category of potential viewer should stay away. If you did not see the first film, you probably have no interest in a dark story of vengeance with plenty of unpleasantness. If you saw the first film and did not like it, expect more of the same in CITY OF ANGELS, only less compelling, less artistic and more obsessed with music video theatrics. And if you saw the first film and _did_ like it, do the memory of Brandon Lee a great honor and do not let his death provide a producer with an excuse to build a franchise this awful on his grave.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 crow's defeats: 2.
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