One of the first things you see in the reimagined “The Crow” is the sight of a fallen white horse in a muddy field, bleeding badly after becoming entangled in barbed wire. It’s a metaphor, of course, and a clunky one at that — a powerful image that doesn’t really fit well and is never explained. That’s a hint that director Rupert Sanders will have a tendency to pick the stylish option over the honest one in this film.
In his attempt to give new life to the cult hero of comics and film, he’s given us plenty of beauty at the expense of depth or coherence. The filmmakers have set their tale in a modern, generic Europe and made it very clear that this movie is based on the graphic novel by James O’Barr, but the 1994 film adaptation starring Brandon Lee hovers over it like, well, a stubborn crow. Brandon, son of legendary actor and martial artist Bruce Lee, was just 28 when he died after being shot while filming a scene for “The Crow.
” History seems always to repeat: The new adaptation lands as the shooting death on the set of “Rust” remains in the headlines. Lee’s “The Crow” was finished without him and he never got to see it enter Gen X memory in all its rain-drenched, gothic glory, influencing everything from alternative fashion to “Blade” to Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” trilogy. Bill Skarsgård seizes Lee’s role of Eric Draven, a man so in love that he returns from the dead to avenge his and his sweetheart’s slayings in what ca.