Rating: 
Summary: Terrible, derivative sequel
Review: This half hearted sequel attempt to the brilliantly moody The Crow is so devoid of any emotion or soul that it still makes me cringe to this day when I watch it just like I did back when it first came out. Vincent Perez plays Ashe; a man resurrected and guided by a crow to avenge his death and the death of his young son. Perez broods his way throughout the film, his wooden acting skills don't let us mourn for him much, same with Mia Kirshner's character Sara (the little girl from the first film now all grown up) and the villians seem like typical card board comic cut outs of typical drug addicted low lifes. In the end, The Crow: City of Angels is a terrible, derivative sequel to the modern day classic original, and would be followed by a direct to video sequel which was a bit better; The Crow: Salvation. The rest of the cast includes Richard Brooks, punk icon Iggy Pop, ex-Power Ranger Thuy Trang, and Thomas Jane who is due to play The Punisher in the upcoming film.
Rating: 
Summary: Nice try, good luck next time... *pats director on head*
Review: This is really not a very good movie. Its got a good visual style, but after that the movie pretty much falls flat. The dialogue is hokey at best, and at worst ludicrous. The villain in this movie is probably one of the worst actors I've ever seen. The film reuses music from the original, which doesn't really work well for the film (including the rock song for the end credits). I dunno - I suppose I could go into everything that makes this bad, but I'd rather not, because it did have its redeeming features. In stead let me put it this way - If the first Crow movie were a gallon of apple juice, this would be a half gallon of apple juice mixed with a half gallon of water.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Sequel!!!
Review: This movie is the best sequel ever. It has everything a movie needs in order to be perfect. Humor, lots of acton, and great costumes, including a sweet plot make this movie a movie that is worth seeing over and over again. Great!
Rating:
Summary: Never Buy Fullscreen
Review: This was a bad movie: it need the romance factor, and never buy Fullscreen, it's just wrong.
Rating: 
Summary: This could have been so much better
Review: Well,as Brandon Lee's THE CROW is one of my favourite films of all time, I wonderded if anything could ever live up to my expectations when I first saw this film.As soon as it started,I knew it was impossible that this film could.The film has the wonderful Gothic look of the fist movie,and Vincent Perez looks the part too,but as soon as he is transformed into the crow his performance just did not work for me.When Brandon becomes the crow he has the menacing gracefulness,the moments of insanity and his softer side shows through when he is reunited with his friends from his former life,and he got the balance just right,sadly as perez weeps and gibbers and goes round banging on steel drums etc it just sort of looks like a bad parody of Brandon Lees great performance.To top that we have IGGY POP as a bad guy and some other dodgy Mad Max 2 rejects with crazy haircuts running around gibbering as well,allthough the lead bad guy Judda almost hits the mark.Iggy may play the ageing hellraiser well,but he looks out of place here.The showdown with the aforementioned cheif bad guy also adds to insult as where we had a stunning shootout followed by a stunning dislay of martial arts skills inherited from his legendary father Bruce that then leads to a tense showdown in a dark gothic church in the first movie,perez climbs a tower (or tries too)and then ends up firing a flock of crows out of his chest (or something).I really do feel I could of made a better job of directing this film to make it more satisfying for fans of the first film and I have no experience in that field at all obviously else I would not be sitting here moaning about it!The only reason I would by this is to look in disbelief and say how did this happen,IT COULD OF BEEN SO MUCH BETTER!The third instalment of the franchise"Salvation" is still no way as good as the orignal but worth more of a go than this.It's a reminder of the waste of Brandon lees talent,as I think I read he was so confident he could play the part well he had signed for the two sequels already.And how right he was.Thanks for reading this if you have.
Rating:
Summary: A Stand Alone Piece
Review: When watching this, the 2nd installment in The Crow movie series, you would only hurt the viewing experience by trying to compare it to the 1st film because as we all know, Brandon Lee will forever be Eric Draven and perhaps, the finest Crow of them all. But this film is meant to be different; in a different place, different time and with similar circumstances happening to very different people.
Vincent Perez brings his own stylings to this already overly stylish film. The use of reds and yellows to give the city a feeling of dirt, smog and an overcast of despondency works fairly well. The whole film feels much more surreal than even the first film's city did; the people here, more corrupt, violent and perverted but it's the triangle of stories that give the film the boost that pushes it out of the gutter of failed sequels.
Mia Kirshner does a fair job of playing a much older Sarah though her face reamins a bit too blank when there should be more emotion. Ashe, the new Crow and his son are, of course murdered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and end up at the bottom of the sea. Upon the Crow's return he receives help from Sarah to begin his trail of revenge. The triangle here is that while he tries to carry out said revenge, he falls in love with Sarah at the same time, the main evil doer this time around, Judah, plots to do whatever he can to stop Ashe before he gets to him. Iggy Pop makes a wacky appearance as one of Judah's subordinates, Curve, getting to be his usual out of control self, even after all these years.
In the end it's an interesting concept, decent delivery and at times feels too short, as if parts could've been added or explained in more depth, but if your a fan of the series, you should at least give it a chance.
Rating:
Summary: Crow sequel leaves bad aftertaste
Review: While many of the images in "The Crow - City of Angels" will stay with you, viewers will come away from this pretentious sequel wishing that the director's/writer's better selves had taken the helm. This murky sequel to the entertaining "The Crow," starring the late Brandon Lee, has the dark gothic taste down pat. Unfortunately, images of torture, sexual orgies and sadism exploit fans of this genre lowering the series to the worst denominator. At times laughably bad and amazingly inept, "The Crow - City of Angels" subtitutes style and the unique with typical and has-been. Vincent Perez certainly looks the part of the brooding anti-hero, risen from the dead to avenge the murder of his son. And Mia Kirshner makes a fine heroine, a pseudo tatoo-artist mentor who leads Perez into his predictable odyssey through a Los Angeles futuristic netherworld of drug addicts, sexual deviants and homeless children. But where this sequel loses direction is in its glorification of brutality - from prisoners of the main villain, to innocent victims in the streets of this civilization where the sun never rises. Certainly the character of The Crow, an inspired combination of Batman, the Vampire Lestat and Ozzy Osbourne, is the stuff fueled by imaginative adolescent nightmares. This series will always have at least that going for it. Trenchcoats, motorcycles, smeared make-up, bad hair days - The Crow must rank as one of the hippest superheroes in history. And occasionaly director Tim Pope (obviously schooled at the MTV film institute) produces a strong image or two in spite of himself. The Crow lounging on the side of a building is the stuff of great blacklight posters. The Crow marching down a dark alleyway towards a retreating villain is an impressive portrait. But for all these visions, the viewer is force-fed the typical - the wooden Iggy Pop as a mannequin villain, the unexceptional Richard Brooks as a one-note ringleader of evil, the faceless Thuy Trang as a high-kicking murderess. Undoubtedly "The Crow - City of Angels" has been inspired by multiple films of Japanese cinema, popularized in Western culture by the works of John Woo and mimicked by Hollywood with "The Matrix," and there are times when squinting your eyes just right, you might be able to see English subtitles (I am kidding, of course). But then comes the predictable B-Movie scenes of brutality, the obvious symbolism of the Day of the Dead celebration, and the excessive servings of faceless murder. And the final conflict of this contrived drama, where what appears to be thousands of crows fly through the soul of the main villain, is about as lazy a resolution/triumph as you will ever see in a film. Darkness comes from a tortured soul, and it has far more depth than "The Crow - City of Angels" could ever hope to dream of. This film is indeed a nightmare, but for all the wrong reasons.
Rating:
Summary: City of Angels lacks salvation
Review: While the gothic and gritty image remain intact, the story line is too watered down and fails to connect on an emotional level. Unlike the original Crow, City of Angels just feels flat all around. The culprit here is the stale script and monotonous acting. Though my opinion differs from the vast majority of reviewers, I thought the bright spot of the film was Perez. I thought his manic portrayal of a father returned to avenge his childs death was right on the money. The movie is a bust, but not entirely unbearable.
Rating:
Summary: Intresting idea ... Horrible follow-through
Review: You know the old joke about what you get when you mix ten gallons of ice cream and a spoonful of manure? Ten gallons of manure. That all I have to say about making a collectors edition of this waste of a movie. The weird thing about The Crow: City of Angels is that I disliked it more out of frustration then the horrible lack of any kind of quality. I actually was intrested in the idea that each movie that comes out would be unconnected to the previous movie and have it's own unique spin. I thought that was an clever way to keep, what was then a viable franchise, fresh. Sometimes I find that the problem with sequels is that the whole movie seems forced in a way. So going into this movie, for a moment or two, I'm feeling this blank-slate start to the sequel gave the movie the potential to be better than the first Crow. Unfortunately everyone on this movie seemed to just drop the ball over and over and after the first twenty minutes any kind of momentum Goyer's story had gained disintegrates into same revenge-o-rama that was found in the first movie. And for all his luscious command of texture, Pope cut his teeth making music videos - and it shows. He pads the now-uneventful story with at least three. There's the "Just Discovered I'm The Crow and I Think I'll Ride My Motorcycle" video. There's the "Here's L.A. By Night, Sort of Looks Like Blade Runner" video (a perennial hit with many sci-fi directors). And there's the "I Want To Fall in Love With You But I Think I'll Ride My Motorcycle Instead" video. Despite the fact that the soundtrack includes music by Hole, Filter, Bush, White Zombie, Seven Mary Three, P.J. Harvey and N.Y. Loose, these sequences are cotton wadding for the mind. The movie, in the end, is even less - and that's a pity. The first Crow was undone by circumstances beyond anyone's control. Brandon Lee (son of Bruce, and around whom it was hoped they could build a series) was accidentally shot to death during a stunt, and the film released was pasted together from the action sequences, which were most of what they'd managed to film. Here, with Perez - visually, a virtual double for Lee- they had an opportunity to give a fascinating idea for a franchise a proper launch, and they've blown it.
|
