The Crow: Wicked Prayer
It was inevitable that the 1994 surprise hit “The Crow” would inspire a franchise. True, the idea of continuing the story of Eric Draven, the character played by the late Brandon Lee in the original film, would be misguided (and yes, I will be looking at the 1998 TV series which did just that, “The Crow: Stairway to Heaven,” soon), but the idea of a crow resurrecting the souls of those whose deaths were unwarranted has legs. James O’Barr may have created his original graphic novel out of personal pain, but he also set the rules for a mythology that people have been trying to maintain since Alex Proyas’s original film hit screens.
In 2005, the last of those cinematic attempts at capturing the pain and potential of O’Barr’s was released in “The Crow: Wicked Prayer.” At the time I watched it back then, it was a sputtering close to a series Dimension Films had abandoned much hope of turning a profit from a long time ago. Like the previous entry, 2000’s “The Crow: Salvation,” the studio released it on one screen for one week before releasing it on DVD to find its audience. By that time, however, the audience for these films had realized there wasn’t much hope that one would reach the artistic and emotional strength of the original film. Watching it now, the film is slightly more compelling, but still suffers from a lot of the same qualities that marred the previous sequels in the series: namely, the lack of originality and feeling from the first film and performances that are painfully over-the-top and sometimes quite silly to watch.
Not surprisingly, the most successful aspects of this film are the central story (inspired by a novel of the same name by Norman Partridge) and the music (by Jamie Christopherson, who creates a soundtrack that is respectful of the emotional and musical palette of prior franchise composers Graeme Revell and Marco Beltrami). As directed by Lance Mungia, who also co-wrote the script with series producer Jeff Most and Sean Hood, “Wicked Prayer” has some compelling visuals in telling the story of Jimmy Cuervo (Edward Furlong), who is murdered along with his girlfriend Lily (Emmanuelle Chriqui) by cult leader Luc Crash (David Boreanaz, far away from the subtlety of his work on “Angel” and “Bones”) and his crew as he prepares to be reborn as Satan on Earth; this franchise has always been a visual filmmaker’s wet dream. Unfortunately, the director of the cult favorite “Six String Samurai” appears to have been inspired less by the haunted work of the first film than the ridiculous mugging of 1996’s “The Crow: City of Angels” in directing his actors. Furlong has some good moments as this film’s Crow, but for the most part his performance hues closer to Vincent Perez’s wretched work in “City of Angels” than Lee’s soulful and wickedly funny performance in the original.
But lead performances haven’t been the only problem for this franchise. In the original “Crow” film, the villains were written in broad strokes that still got to the dark heart of the characters, while the sequels have tried to give the bad guys more depth, with mixed results (the most memorable being Iggy Pop’s Curve in “City of Angels”). “Wicked Prayer” fails spectacularly, if only because of the people in the main roles. Boreanaz never really translated his small screen success to cinema, and he doesn’t do himself any favors as Crash in this film. As his girlfriend, Lola Byrne (get it, Crash and Byrne), Tara Reid makes us further wonder how it is she became a “successful” actress in the first place; I guess it was just luck, although she does have the look of a woman who would wed herself to Satan for a leg up. And Dennis Hopper, why did you disgrace yourself as El Nino, who I guess was supposed to be a satanist priest or something like that? As Lily’s father, Danny Trejo would later show more depth as Machete than he does in this role. Only Chriqui comes out looking good in her too-brief role as Lily; why couldn’t she have been this film’s Crow?
Viewing “The Crow: Wicked Prayer” again all the way to the end, it isn’t hard to see why the franchise came to the end it did; it’s a laughable disaster that forgets the pain that not only inspired O’Barr’s original comic series but also continues to reverberate from the original film with its final performance by Brandon Lee. The problem with all of the sequels of this series is that they were inspired by the visuals and ideas of the original story but forgot the grieving heart that made it a classic. Word of resurrecting O’Barr’s “The Crow” on the big screen has been circulating for a few years now, but not much I’ve heard of the development process has led me to think the results will be any different than they have been since 1996.
