The Crow: City of Angels [Tim Pope, 1996]:
A famously contentious and much derided sequel to the popular but ill-fated comic book revenge film The Crow (1994). Noted post-production interference and re-cutting from the always problematic Harvey Weinstein and brother Bob may have played some part in the film's many narrative shortcomings, but there's no escaping that this is fundamentally a derivative and inferior copy of the first film in both plot and theme. Visually, it's sometimes striking – the hyper-saturated colors, urban hellscape and vibrant ‘Day of the Dead’ pageantry of the final third, is a contrast to the first film's goth monochrome – but this is a definite case of diminished returns. Tim Pope, a music video pioneer of the early 1980s, has proven himself a great filmmaker many times across his numerous videos for artists as varied as The Cure, Talk Talk, The The, Soft Cell, Neil Young and The Style Council, and should've been a great match for the material. A real tragedy then that he ended up tangled up with such a compromised effort.
