They’re all so interchangeable and never quite pose a real threat to anyone. There’s a goon named Spider Monkey obsessed with the drug his boss Judah touts who suffers a fate involving a massive explosion that gives the director an excuse to use pyrotechnics. The explosion in the drug factory is eye catching but then once the crow flies past the palm trees setting them ablaze, I just scratched my head. Was that entirely necessary? Then there’s Rob Zombie’s “Boogeyman” blaring as Ashe emerges from the wrecked factory which would have been incredible had Ashe actually been somewhat of a charismatic force of nature who you’d be frightened of. The confrontation between Ashe and Spider Monkey is lame and I never quite understood why he was worth focusing on for a portion of the film. From there we follow Ashe through the city as he battles yet another annoying caricature Nemo, who dons a red wig because of his baldness and is a veritable addict of sex and voyeurism. How does that play out in the story?<\/p>\n
Well, he films everything he does, so this allows our villain Judah to see Ashe being murdered to gain a sense of who he is and why he’s come back for them. Convenience is part of the plot and not actual storytelling prowess. Everything the characters do allow for convenient, sometimes too much coincidental, use in the future of the film which prevents any plot holes. So they’re able to scrounge up footage of Ashe and just naturally assume it’s him doing the murders. It also helps that main baddie Judah has a spiritual guide of his own explaining that a past victim will re-emerge to bring him down, which puts him on the defensive. Once again it’s all about convenience.<\/p>\n
Nonetheless he invites Ashe to him and allows him to pursue his vengeance rather than striking back. Nemo is played by a barely recognizable Thomas Jane who suffers a vicious fate in a local sex shop. The scenario is hysterical as Jane is painful in his performance and experiences a quick death at Ashe’s hands by having his eyes cut out. This is of course implied as Judah’s messenger Curve appears at the crime scenes just in time to see his buddies be offed but misses Ashe and is there to merely report the murders. It’s confounding that Ashe never waits around for Curve to kill him too, but the character is played by Iggy Pop, so Pope enlists his appeal for as long as possible before ending his misery.<\/p>\n
Assuming all of the villains have to have some link to the spiritual world, the resident villain Judah is pretty much just a distant cousin of Michael Wincott’s Top Dollar, and this is a theme that would carry on through the rest of the movies. In the movies, unlike the graphic novels, there has to be a villain who is linked to the spiritual and supernatural world as the crow is and Goyer goes all out to make Judah a duplicate of Top Dollar. He hides in an ivory tower looking on to the city, he has his own weapons, he has armed guards, a small gang of henchmen to carry out his bidding, and yes, he even has a female confidant who connects the dots in the events leading to his confrontation with the undead avenger just to let the audience know what the crow is all about and do the work for a man we’re told is so smart he can not be touched. With no disrespect to Richard Brooks, his performance isn’t pretty and all of the monologues he’s given fall flat because he can’t quite do much with the material he’s given.<\/p>\n
And if that’s not enough he simply isn’t as active as Top Dollar. He simply sits around watching other people interact, and listening to his utterly obnoxious deus ex machina of a spiritual guide who walks around with a hood over her face reciting the exact same lines Bai Ling did in the original movie. There’s no creativity in this sequel. I almost picture that they and Top Dollar’s crew meet up for Sunday barbecues ranting about anarchy and violence while Judah’s guide Sybill and Myca go off together to rant nonsense about the crows mystical powers while eating a hotdog. Unlike Top Dollar, it takes more than one person to explain that the crow holds all of the power. Which is also quite annoying considering he was just explained that the crow brought back Ashe from the dead to avenge his death. What’s so hard to figure out?<\/p>\n
And then to keep the story going, Judah naturally assumes that because his sidekick Iggy Pop has a crow tattoo given to him by someone, that the person who gave it to him must know Ashe and must have a link to the crow and its powers. Why? The movie is almost done, that’s why! “City of Angels” is not just a derivative hokey mess, but it is an obvious grab for either another sequel or a television series, because halfway through rather than going to heaven with his son, Ashe figures he has to stay in the real world for reasons unknown. It’s pretty pathetic that this movie mostly came to be known as the last appearance by Thuy Trang, the young actress who appeared as the Yellow Ranger in the painfully racist “Power Rangers” series. She was unfortunately killed in a car crash shortly after filming. No, there’s no curse. That’s called human tragedy.<\/p>\n
Oddly enough she’s the only character in the movie that I actually liked and she’s the only one who seemed to pour herself in to the role and came out of it with success. Even with awkward exchanges like this:<\/p>\n
Kali:<\/strong> You know how to fight? Really? That’s the best Goyer could actually come up with? Either the writers didn’t have enough faith in Perez to deliver dialogue without revealing his French accent, or they just couldn’t come up with something to match the quippy dialogue in the original film. I know that’s a tough feat, but you could at least give it a shot. As the film staggers on, Goyer seems to work for something new and reveals that you can take away the power and use the power of the crow, something Myca wanted to do but never could until Judah kills the crow, drinks its blood and becomes Bizarro crow with super powers and a slightly racist moniker of “The Shadow.” Get it? Ashe has white face, Judah is black? I’ll refer to him as Bizarro crow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" They’re all so interchangeable and never quite pose a real threat to anyone. There’s a goon named Spider Monkey obsessed with the drug his boss Judah touts who suffers a fate involving a massive explosion that gives the director an excuse to use pyrotechnics. The explosion in the drug factory is eye catching but then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[58,155,221,420,477,637,922,1055,1087],"class_list":["post-429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pcthugs","tag-action","tag-brandon-lee","tag-comic-book","tag-gothic","tag-horror","tag-masterpiece","tag-sequel","tag-the-crow","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n Ashe:<\/strong> You know how to die?<\/p>\n