Bill Skarsgård is an emo death angel

Bill Skarsgård is a tattooed, gothic angel of death in Rupert Sanders' grim reimagining of The Crow, an adaptation of James O'Barr's supernatural graphic novel series rather than a reboot of Alex Proyas' controversial 1994 cult favorite. (This version of Proyas remains a Film Maudit is an understatement, as star Brandon Lee was killed by a prop weapon during a production in his honor that featured special effects and a stunt double.)

This version of “The Crow,” written by Zach Baylin and William Schneider, wisely eschews real guns, though it's full of stylized ballistic kills and led by an undead Eric Draven (Skarsgård in the role of Lee) avenging the brutal death of his girlfriend (FKA Twigs, real name Tahliah Barnett). Despite the moody, grim set and Skarsgård's menacing silhouette as a very tall and beautiful walking corpse, Sanders' “The Crow” is less revealing plot-wise, and is hampered by an underdeveloped and often confusing mythology that leaves the disturbing details of O'Barr's original dead.

The Crow casts Eric as a traumatized Freudian weirdo haunted by a rough childhood somewhere in Michigan. The film opens gruesomely, with a dying horse impaled by barbed wire, young Eric (Solo Uniacke) unable to save the animal or a work-shy mother at home. That's about the deepest exploration of his past this film offers, and it jumps ahead in time to his adult life, where an unspecified, demonic addiction lands him in a rehab center. And there's Shelly (musician and avant-garde artist FKA Twigs), fleeing a vaguely constructed fleet of elite criminals led by Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston, whose casual presence can elevate even the most half-baked material). She's haunted by an iPhone video whose contents implicate her in a murder — and which is revealed much later in more graphic detail, but “The Crow” is almost shocking because it throws us into the plot so quickly with so little information.

The fact that this rehab facility allows all genders to mingle is a strange device to get us to meet Eric, whose cell is papered with disturbing ink drawings from his past, and the shy Shelly, a former musician. When Vincent and his henchmen show up at the facility, Eric helps Shelly escape a little too easily (why didn't they think of cutting off her shackles and jumping out the laundry room window earlier?), and they hole up in a mauve-colored apartment belonging to Shelly's boyfriend, who lives in Antigua.

They do drugs, fuck and read the tortured poet Rimbaud in the most obvious gothic literary reference in a material steeped in them. Elsewhere, Shelly's friend Zadie (Isabella Wei) is murdered by Vincent, whose telepathic evil power is to whisper something horrible into a victim's ear, tapping into the darkest parts of their soul and causing them to kill themselves. A fascinating murderous procedure that should be even more horrific than it is as the bodies of the hollow characters pile up.

Shelly is devastated by her friend's death, and so is Vincent. Both she and Eric are killed in a brutal suffocation scene — until Eric is thrown into an unbound in-between, a steampunk limbo with a spirit guide (Sami Bouajila) full of misty platitudes about life, death and what comes after. Eric is resurrected in the mortal world and given the chance to set things right, with instructions to kill everyone who took the lives of Shelley and her friends. The dark heart of “The Crow” lies in this doomed romance between Eric and Shelly, with Skarsgård and FKA Twigs sharing a sensual physical chemistry, even if their characters are largely underplayed. What are their cultural interests? Goals? Who were these people before we met them? Sanders gives FKA Twigs a musical moment that reminds us of the groundbreaking artist's true gift behind a microphone and a piano.

The film's mystical mumbo jumbo and dank, dank Detroit atmosphere (Steve Annis handles cinematography) combine to create an experience that feels a little like 2000s emo, though Baylin and Schneider's script doesn't do much to put this story (first published in 1989) into a contemporary context. A gory scene set to “Ropert le diable,” in which Eric breaks into an opera house, is impressively staged, with realistic gunshot wounds oozing blood and smoke as Skarsgård empties yet another gun into an evil lackey.

Eric's invincibility and newfound power to escape death – but he feels all the pain when gunshot wounds take his breath away or bones protrude from his body during a chase – limit the tension as Skarsgård races through scenes. Why doesn't anyone think to just decapitate this guy? Could he regenerate his head as easily as his wounds? I'd love to see that.

The Crow's only superficially sketched story arc leads to the inevitable philosophical showdown between Eric and the film's arch-nemesis, Vincent. Huston is a sympathetic portrayal of evil, his ability to raise an eyebrow or turn his voice into a subterranean roar a special effect in itself. But the mythology of the nefarious society that's after Eric and Shelly — their mother has something to do with it, but who knows what — is seriously flawed. We don't know exactly what these evildoers want, or what they've even done with Shelly. (There's a hint of upper-class human trafficking here.)

Skarsgård's performance, which is more compelling because of the actor's combative posture than the dramas that made him the kind of person who wears a black trench coat and smears dark eye makeup the way Robert Smith does with his Twinkier hair, is an intriguing foretaste of the Count Orlok he'll play in Robert Eggers' upcoming “Nosferatu.” Here, the actor is often shirtless, sporting killer muscles, a mullet and tattooed from head to toe, and that's sexy, even if his character is a walking nothing, a paint-killed soul who is often simply deadly on screen because he fails to make us join in. “The Crow” isn't a waste of talent or resources; worse, it just hangs there on the screen, as undead as Eric himself.

Grade: C

“The Crow” hits Lionsgate theaters on Friday, August 23rd.