'Crow' fails to live up to memory of Brandon Lee

By Laksmi Pamuntjak-Djohan

JAKARTA (JP): A crow flies over a dark, decaying city. "It is the link between this world and the next," explains the female narrator later in The Crow: City of Angels. "After all, life is just a dream on the way to death."

Welcome back to the visceral world of The Crow, a homage to those restless departed souls who seek justice in a world gone bad. Taking over from the highly-visionary Alex Proyas for this sequel is British director Tim Pope in his directorial debut.

It all started with Ridley Scott's Blade Runner 15 years ago. Now the darkly macabre design and bleak worldview that it introduced has become the staple inspiration of the cyberpunk movement.

We are certainly no stranger to the dystopias of futuristic movies - dark, brooding urban panoramas in which crime and anarchy have spiraled out of control. The Batman movie series is perhaps the first modern franchise to successfully optimize on this widely imitated style.

Although 1994's The Crow wasn't a box-office success, it struck a chord all the same. First, its depiction of dystopia was top-notch. The setting didn't only make suburbia look preferable, but the entire film was also stylishly directed and well-edited.

Second, the hip, rapid-fire soundtrack fared well with the MTV generation. Although it was mostly alternative-postmodern- industrial, it definitely had its audience. Third, it had Brandon Lee. This was where the luck factored in (if this is not a gross misapplication of the term).

As it is now well known, Lee, who played a man who returned from the dead to avenge his own murder, was killed during an accident during filming. Although he did deliver a sensitive performance, much of the movie's emotional vibration had been generated by the specter of his ironic death. But to say that the movie had exclusively relied on people's morbid curiosity would be grossly unfair: Lee had made the gothic look - the kabuki make-up, face paint, blood-shot eyes, black lipstick, black leather outfit - his own.

Which brings us to the critical question: Why make a sequel? Apart from the inescapable fact that any discussion of Brandon's successor will sound like a discussion of who is the better James Bond, it isn't as if The Crow: City of Angels provides any sense of continuity to the original movie. It's essentially a total remake of the first film, but with a different protagonist.

Admittedly, the original Crow character, the comic brainchild of James O. Barr, has all the potential to go franchise. But The City of Angles' producers have committed a classic blunder by underestimating the power of the earlier feature. Which begs another question: Whatever possessed Miramax - a production house known for its impeccable judgment - to get entangled in a project so risky?

Vincent Perez, the French actor who dazzled European audiences in Indochine and Queen Margot, may have the right look, but he simply isn't Brandon Lee. Not that the latter was such a fantastic actor to start with, but the memory of a handsome, virile young man cut down in his prime is too much even for Hollywood to tamper with.

The setting is now a gothic, post-apocalyptic L.A. ruled by Judah Earl (Richard Brooks). As the main provider of sex and drugs, he runs a sick and violent society filled with voyeurism, hypodermic needles and stoned-out cohorts.

Revenge

One day Judah orders Ashe Corven (Perez) and his young son killed when they chance upon an evil deed conducted by his men. Aided by the Crow - the source of both his power and vulnerability - Ashe comes back to life to exact justice.

This recycled revenge motive is pretty acceptable, had it not been relegated to being mere fillers for a series of throbbing, hyper-kinetic, heavy metal music videos. Evita does this, but being a musical, a perfunctory script is not an issue. To an extent, Baz Luhrmann's hyper-stylized rendition of Romeo and Juliet also does this, but it keeps the spirit of the Bard somewhat intact.

The City of Angels atmosphere is a real work of art: in fact, there is not a single scene that isn't worthy of a spot on MTV. The future has never looked so frightening, thanks to the hyper- stylized cinematography of Jean Yves Escoffier. But here is a film so enraptured by its own excesses that it forgets to tell a story.

Theatrics over acting, style over substance. The same old story.

Moral

Granted, the basic moral is already flawed to start with: history has proven that the notion of "an eye for an eye" doesn't solve crime; if anything, it perpetuates more violence. Yet, The Crow redeemed this slightly by making the good vs. evil distinction very clear. There was much humanity in Brandon Lee's character - something that made audiences feel he had a point.

In contrast, none of the characters in the sequel evoke any sense other than mindless gratuity. Sarah (Mia Kirshmer), the tattoo artist who cared for Ashe, is such a wooden and uninteresting character that her purpose in the movie is easily lost on audiences. Ashe himself is so caught up in his own histrionics that he doesn't have time for relationships - not with Sarah or anybody else for that matter.

If Brandon Lee's character was an endearing mixture of humor, vulnerability and rage, there is nothing remotely sympathetic about Ashe. He just goes on a killing rampage, eliminating his murders one by one cold-bloodedly. At times, he even looks more evil than the baddies, and that's hard to achieve with the likes of Crude (Iggy Pop) as villains.

Which brings us to the only piece of casting that works. Crude, the grossest screen villain you're likely to have seen for a long time, is much more effective than Brooks' terminally boring Judah, who looks so far removed from the society he purports to control that his grisly demise doesn't seem to make any difference.

In the end, nothing makes any difference, and the future seems even bleaker than at the start of the film. As you watch the death-masked multitude gathered around the final battle scene, you realize that Judah's death doesn't even represent a denunciation of crime. This is indeed a world where everybody, including the baddies, is a victim.