The Crow: City of Angels (1996)

The Crow: City of Angels arrives in 1996 as a stand-alone sequel, a moody slab of urban gothic in which a murdered mechanic named Ashe Corven is fished out of a harbor by a crow and set loose upon the drug cartel that killed him and his son. Tim Pope, a music video director, gives the thing a wet, blue-black sheen, and Vincent Perez broods handsomely in face paint. The film was, by most accounts, taken from him in the editing room by the Weinsteins, who wanted a structure that matched the 1994 original. What reached theaters is a sloppy pretender, as the reviewers of the day agreed, though the cinematography retains its defenders.

The interesting material sits behind the camera. James O'Barr pitched a sequel built around a resurrected bride, and David Goyer agreed to write only if the protagonist were a woman. Miramax rejected both, reportedly on the grounds that nobody would pay to see an action film with a female lead. What we got instead is a father's revenge story, and Sarah Mohr, the returning tattoo artist, occupies a supporting position in a narrative that belongs to a man. That production history is worth recording. The finished film carries no feminist argument whatsoever. It carries leather, rain, and a body count.

The cast is diverse by the standards of its moment, with Thuy Trang, Richard Brooks, and a Swiss lead, and the script never remarks upon any of it. No character pauses to explain what their presence signifies. Race is not a subject here, nor is sexuality, nor the climate, nor the body, nor the mind's varied wiring. Judah Earl is a drug lord, and the film holds no interest in economics. The moral register is vengeance, delivered without a sermon. It is a grim, pretty, mostly unsuccessful genre exercise that asks nothing of its audience except patience. The sommelier notes a thin vintage, poured into a heavy glass.

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