THE CROW: CITY OF ANGELS
A film review by Christopher E. Meadows
Copyright 1996 Christopher E. Meadows
My score: 2/10 (* out of a possible *****)
If you loved Highlander and groaned at Highlander II and III...if you loved Alien and Aliens but Alien^3 made you want to beat your head repeatedly against the wall...if you enjoyed The Crow, then use the money you would have spent on City of Angels to rent the original and watch it again. City of Angels is a waste of money and a waste of time.
Why did the original Crow work so well, and the sequel fall so flat? Let's compare the two movies, look at what The Crow had that COA (or, perhaps more appropriately, _DOA_) did not.
Leaving aside the issue of morbid curiosity and publicity (which shouldn't have anything to do with how good the movie actually is in the first place), firstly, The Crow had Brandon Lee. His poise, his screen presence, his sardonic humor...the more I watch The Crow, the more I mourn his premature passing. City of Angels had Vincent Perez, who just went around killing people.
When it comes right down to it, one of The Crow's greatest assets were its characters. Brandon Lee's Eric D'Raven, Ernie Hudson's sympathetic beat-cop Albrecht, Michael Wincott's fiendishly charismatic Top Dollar, the thugs, Sarah, Sarah's mother, the whiny pawnshop owner...whether you loved them or hated them, they were all memorable, they said memorable things ("At least he didn't do that 'walking against the wind' shit. Man, I hate that...") and it made a difference to you whether they lived or died.
City of Angels gives us cardboard cutouts who wander the movie's dark backdrop and occasionally get killed and/or mutilated, many of whom are direct clones of characters or aspects of characters from the first movie. Whereas in The Crow, I watched Eric Draven hunt down and kill his murderers and relished every moment, in CoA I just wished he would get _on_ with it. We just don't _care_ about these people, which means what happens to them has very little impact upon the viewers.
And then there's the story of the film itself. It may not be _War and Peace_, but there _was_ a story to The Crow that was, if I might be so bold, uplifting. It wasn't just a "guy comes back from the dead for revenge" movie; in a very real sense it was a story about seeing the desolation and depravity of your surroundings and rising _above_ them--as the song went, "it can't rain all the time." Some people are capable of this redemption on their own (like Sarah); others (like her mother) need a little help, and there are still people out there trying, even if they doubt they'll ever make a bit of difference (Albrecht). City of Angels, on the other hand, just gives us a dead guy running around killing people.
City of Angels, while it rips off the basic plot of The Crow and even clones a scene or two, so utterly and completely misses the point that it's just not worth sitting through. More attention is paid to the atmosphere than to the story, and with the rock soundtrack and the avante-garde cinematography, it sometimes feels more like you're watching a 90-minute music video on MTV. Viewers are treated to an hour and a half of depravity and violence, with none of the humor, the emotion, the redemption of the original movie. Not only is it pointless, it commits the cardinal sin of being _boring_, and it cheapens the first film.
Leave this one for the same teen Goth crowd that keeps White Wolf Games in business...I imagine _they'll_ eat it up.
-- (This review is copyright 1995 by Christopher E. Meadows. Distribution is okay as long as it's not for profit and this notice remains intact. Permission granted for all rec.arts.movies.reviews and Internet Movie Database archival, including CD-ROM. Distribution on any other CD-ROM is verboten without Chris's permission, however.) -- Chris Meadows aka | Author, Team M.E.C.H.A., Crapshoot & Co. Robotech_Master | on the Superguy Listserv (bit.listserv.superguy) robotech@jurai.net | With a World Wide Web homepage located at robotech@eyrie.org | http://www.jurai.net/~robotech/index.html
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