Bill Skarsgård is the only cute Skarsgård out of the many tall Swedish Skarsgårdian actors who haunt our screens. He’s big-eyed and gaunt and sweet-looking, as opposed to father Stellan with the small shifty eyes, who’s a natural in villain roles, and hulking brother Alexander, who played the Viking berserker of Robert Eggers’s The Northman. Which makes it interesting that boyish Bill Skarsgård is best known for his evil clown Pennywise in It (2017) and his fancy-pants baddie in John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) — and he’ll soon star in another Eggers film, playing the not-at-all-cute role of vampire Count Orlok in the upcoming remake of Nosferatu.

If I seem to be avoiding the actual topic of this review, which is the “reboot” of The Crow, starring Bill Skarsgård in the old Brandon Lee role of Eric Draven aka the Crow, it’s true — I am. I’m sick of reporting on the dismal films of August, that cinematic dumping ground between whatever would-be popular high-summer releases are available each year and the “return to quality” films of the fall.

The Crow is so despised, critics have run out of adjectives reviling it. How many ways can you say a movie stinks?

Well, a lot, if you read the reviews. “Unimaginative, “tiresome,” “confusing,” “uninteresting,” “ugly,” “incoherent,” “dull,” “forgettable,” “sluggish,” and “sloppily made” are just a few of the insults slung at this misbegotten reboot of the 1994 low-budget, high-style Gothic film by Alex Proyas (Dark City, I, Robot). The Proyas film, which is the one out of four other previous films in the franchise that most people remember, became morbidly identified with the untimely death of Bruce Lee’s son, Brandon, in an on-set accident involving a prop gun. This new one has been stuck in development hell since 2008, with many different combinations of production companies, actors, and directors announced as being attached to the film over the years.

It’s finally limped to the screen, directed by Rupert Sanders (Ghost in the Shell, Snow White and the Huntsman), who insists this version is gritty and realistic compared to the Proyas film. It’s not. It’s loaded with lurid CGI and occult hooey about crime lord Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), who made a pact with the devil in order to get eternal life but has to pay with fresh souls stolen from young women he coerces into murder and suicide by whispering demonic blather into their ears.

The troubled Shelly, played by British singer FKA Twigs, is his latest victim, and she escapes his assassins by getting herself arrested on drug charges and taken into custody. She’s sent to rehab, where pink-uniformed addicts live in a dorm-like setting that looks pretty nice, but they pay the price of staying there with lots of therapy and forced jumping-jack drills. There she meets “brilliantly broken” Eric Draven, and they fall in love and run away together.

Eric is one of those emo guys who writes anguished poetry in his journal, illustrated by dark, scribbly drawings. He’s all tatted up with lugubrious imagery like the laughing-crying masks representing the comedy and tragedy of the theater, only both his masks are crying. We know from the opening sequence that he’s terribly damaged. It features Eric as a small boy walking home down a rural road bearing an errand-running bagful of something, only to find a white horse tangled in barbed wire and dying before his eyes. Why is the horse — presumably his horse — dying, instead of just badly cut up by the wire? We don’t know. We just know that, meanwhile, his painfully thin mother is passed out in a nearby trailer, with thinness representing drug abuse, and Eric’s hand is cut trying to free the horse, which expires before his eyes, and it’s all very traumatic.

Eric and Shelly hide out at a mansion that Shelly’s friend conveniently lets her use. There they have a sex idyll that bonds them together through what are supposed to be tougher times to follow when they’re living in urban squalor. What they’re living on, we don’t know, as they don’t get jobs, but again, their squalor is most people’s idea of living pretty well.

It’s also puzzling why they go back to the same city where Shelly is being actively pursued by Vincent Roeg’s assassins, except for the extradiegetic fact that they have to be caught and killed so the main plot can start. If they’re not horribly murdered, Eric can’t come back from the dead, guided by the crows that supposedly accompany souls loosed from their bodies, to fulfill his quest for revenge against the murderers.

I like deathless revenge stories, but this one drags on unmercifully. You’d think it would add more supernatural zing, all these devil’s minions who Eric returns to kill. But he punches and shoots and hacks his way through them in perfectly ordinary action film ways. There’s a climactic opera scene full of blue-lit arias and balletic miming out of anguish while the final confrontations take place, and Eric has to climb a lot of red-carpeted opera hall stairs to move up the ranks to Vincent Roeg. This is clearly inspired by the grand finale of the John Wick franchise, which executed it much better.

In short, Bill Skarsgård is appealing and all, but he can only do so much in trying to bring this dreary mess to life. You might as well save yourself the ticket price and the tedium and wait to see him in Nosferatu, which comes out in December.

We’ve got to believe there are better times ahead — cinematically, anyway.