Review of The Crow: Wicked Prayer (2005) by Andrew K — 28 Mar 2012

This is where The Crow series came to die. I cannot fully express my disappoint over the injustice done to the source material here or to Edward Furlong. I was so excited when I saw him cast in the lead.

I thought, "Wow! After Salvation, maybe this one will turn the series around." Boy, was I wrong. I have long loved Edward Furlong as an actor, but apparently he was not enough to save this horrible movie.

It was an atrocity on every level. The casting was horrible. Tara Reid and David Boreanaz are not good actors, especially not in this. I love Danny Trejo, but his character here was all wrong. I also like Marcus Chong and Yuji Okumoto, but their invented characters were ridiculous.

Very two dimensional. Not the fault of the actors in my opinion. Emmanuelle Chriqui did an okay job, but she was too young for the part. Dennis Hopper was ridiculous. So was everyone else. The script, direction and production were terrible.

The real tragedy was, as with it's predecessor, that there was a perfectly good novel, on which this movie was based, that would have made a really good movie. The novel, The Crow: Wicked Prayer, follows our loner protagonist, Dan Cody (much better name than Jimmy Cuervo.

OH MY GOD with the ridiculous crow-based names!) who is in love with a self-reliant, desert tough but beautiful hal crow indian woman named Lily Dreams the Truth Hardin. Lily runs the trading post in Scorpion Flats, Arizona, owned by her now extremely disabled father whom she also cares for.

Lily should have been likely in her late twenties or early thirties. She should also not have seemed so fragile. This is a Crow story of solitude as the resurrected Dan Cody chases a truly terrifying woman and her thug/boyfriend from Arizona through Vegas and ultimately to California.

He also does so as a half-rotting corpse, as his powers are stolen early on by the woman. The book was much better. They should have left it alone and made that into a movie.