What do you remember most about the 1994 movie The Crow ? Is it the soundtrack, a semiperfect hodgepodge of industrial-music MVPs (My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, Machines of Loving Grace, Nine Inch Nails), next-gen alt-rock (Helmet, Rage Against the Machine, Stone Temple Pilots), and goth royalty (the Cure)? The recasting of Detroit as a dystopian hellscape? Villainous lovers Michael Wincott and Bai Ling vamping around a dimly-lit den and setting new standards for #CreepyCoupleGoals? The adorable skateboarding moppet that informs detective Ernie Hudson that onions on hot dogs cause farting? The fact that the whole thing feels like a homicidal mime accidentally wandered into a Stabbing Westward music video? Or is it the tragedy that befell the movie’s leading man, and cast a pall over this blockbuster even as it secured the film’s eulogistic legacy? Hitting theaters near the exact midpoint between Tim Burton’s Batman and the first X-Men film, this adaptation of James O’Barr’s comics — about a man who comes back from the dead to avenge his murdered girlfriend — was one of several early toe-dips into darker superhero cinema . But what it was really designed to do was launch the career of Brandon Lee, the son of Bruce Lee , as a new action star. His accidental death on set, eight days before the movie wrapped, initially added a morbid edge to the project.
Yet his performance remains the single best thing about the film, and what could have been crass exploitatio.