Loki Walks Into A Bar And Throws Three Nails On The Desk: Tom Hiddleston Up To Play The Crow

It was a long night in Boston last night; between the cops putting the arm on the surviving Boston Massacre bomber right around the time they lifted the lockdown, and the cancellation of the Boston Comic Con (meaning we suddenly didn’t need to get up early this morning), well, much liquor was consumed.

So our energy levels are low today – and I swear, this will be the last time that we use the weirdness of the past six days to plead for anemic levels of content here (although we might come up with something else) – but we found this interesting item that is either really promising news for the movie, or a wretched and ill-advised portent of doom for the actor: apparently Tom Hiddleston, the guy who played Loki in Thor and The Avengers, is going out for a role in another superhero movie.

Problem is, that role is of The Crow, in the remake of the 1994 Brandon Lee movie of the same name.

Hoo, boy.

According to The Wrap, the remake’s being written by Cliff Dorfman (who wrote Warrior, a recent flick about some mixed martial artists), directed by F. Javier Gutierrez (who directed Before The Fall), and not only are they heavily courting Hiddleston to play Eric (as a guy who read The Crow years before the movie came out, I refuse to call him Eric Draven), but Hiddleston has done his own Crow makeup test at home to prove he can carry off the look of the character.

Okay: Hiddleston is a good actor, and I’ve heard decent things about Before The Fall and Warrior. And the original movie The Crow is decent enough, really elevated from utter 90s-style quickie comic book fare like the Dolph Lundgren The Punisher and the original Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd only by the visual style of director Alex Proyas and the performance of Brandon Lee as The Crow. But beyond those elements… can you really say that even the original The Crow was a good movie? I mean, the bad guy has some kind of sorcerer chick, and his entire criminal organization is based on the money-making opportunities of randomly setting fires one night a year, and the hero’s best friend is, well, a Ghostbuster. Compare that to the despair and nihilism on display of every page of James O’Barr’s original miniseries, and the original The Crow is a Jesus-Walks-Into-A-Hotel joke and a Nine Inch Nails song away from being a forgotten direct-to-VHS release.

And the proof is, well, in every single iteration of The Crow following that 1994 original. From The Crow: City of Angels (the first sequel to the original) to The Crow: Stairway to Heaven (the 1998 basic cable television series starring Mark Dacascos – best known now for playing The Chairman on Iron Chef America), the people who own the rights to the character have reduced him to a haircut, a makeup job and a clever line or two. By now, the public image of The Crow is that of a James Bond knockoff with facepaint and some vague revenge motive, almost completely obfuscating the pain and loss that made the original comic series – and none of the sequels since – so compelling.

So I clearly have reservations about another movie of The Crow. However, Tom Hiddleston was effective as Loki, a character with a dark sense of humor and a core motivation of loss, confusion and betrayal, so he’s probably a decent a choice for Eric as just about anyone. But the key to making a really successful Crow movie is not to remake the original movie – which, again, is about two people away from being only okay on a good day – but to hit the original comic book. There is more raw emotion and empathy in any short chapter of the original comic book than there is in the entirety of the filmed franchise. And following that story could make one hell of a movie.

I guess we’ll have to see… but I don’t have a lot of hope. There isn’t a lot of fun to go around in O’Barr’s original comic series. There’s a lot of pain and loss and everybody dies and nobody wins. But in a motion picture environment where even Batman gets a happy ending at the end of The Dark Knight Rises, there’s probably not a lot of demand for a “hero” who exists only to kill enough people to be at peace enough to, well, remain dead.

I’m hoping I’m wrong… but 18 years of shitty movies and TV shows of The Crow aren’t a good bellwether. But then again, neither was Batman & Robin, so I’ll hold out at least a little bit of hope.

(via The Wrap)