Blessed films are easy to sell: they are magnificent, period. Unfortunately, cursed ones are also easy to sell: how can you not talk about a work (and even go to see it) that ended the life of its protagonist halfway through filming due to the poor shooting of a real bullet that should not have been there, and even more so if that actor was the son of a legend. Just ask Brandon Lee, Bruce’s son, who died at the age of 28 in these circumstances during the filming of The Raven (1994), by Alex Proyas. Or just ask Alec Baldwin and his cursed western. Rust.
With The raven, new version of the comics James O’Barr, Something curious has happened recently: since it took a whopping 15 years to be produced since work began, it has also been sold in some media as a peculiar extension of its unhealthy legend. In this decade and a half, several directors, scriptwriters and actors have passed through it (among them, Stephen Norrington and the Spanish filmmakers Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and Francisco Javier Gutiérrez, as well as the actors Luke Evans and Jason Momoa), but nothing could be further from the truth than a new black hand; simply the tricky process that certain blockbusters sometimes have, although it seems obvious that during filming they took it seriously and adopted extreme measures to avoid accidents, such as using fake guns, something strange in US productions.
Now, of course, you have to sell it. And the shortest way is something like “the remake of that movie that ended Brandon Lee’s life.” However, they are wrong there too, because this Sanders thing is not a remake but a re-reading with quite a few internal changes, although the basis is the same: the state between life and shadows of a young man murdered along with his girlfriend, who returns from the dead to take revenge on the guilty. And, above all, with a completely different structure from Proyas’ film, and a tone that is much less dark, much more violent and, if you like, realistic. Thirty years after the gothic look of Proyas, director of the excellent Dark City (1998), whose career faded away after the entertaining I, Robot (2004), Sanders takes up the baton with a less juvenile work (“Who the hell gets married on Halloween?” said one of the criminals before murdering the couple the day before their wedding), not suitable for all audiences (don’t take the children, this isn’t Marvel), which finds precisely in the unbridled violence and the staging of this its best source of energy, and almost only one.
Like his brother Alexander, Bill Skarsgård, another of Stellan’s children, a great Danish actor, has a disturbing face and an elusive gaze with immense potential, but it is difficult to find the cinematic grace (interpretive and photogenic) of the British singer FKA Twigs. And in the narrative and visual, despite a couple of images with a certain power, the first half, prior to the deaths that in Proyas’ version occurred five minutes in, set largely in a kind of dystopian sanatorium for young people with addictions, half prison, half military barracks, and where the two “soul mates” of the story meet, is close to boring.
But after the staging of the massacre, complete with some chilling close-ups, this new crow recovers thanks to the choreography of a couple of remarkable action sequences (one inside a car, another in the final climax at the opera), and could find its audience among fans of explicitness: throat-slitting, dismemberment, broken necks in close-up and blood splattering everywhere. At least this part takes off, and it ends nicely.
The Raven
Address: Rupert Sanders.
Performers: Bill Skarsgård, FKA twigs, Danny Huston, Sami Bouajila.
Gender: fantastic. USA, 2024.
Duration: 110 minutes.
Release: August 30th.
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