The Crow: City of Angels

Los Angeles is now officially the host of the apocalypse. Sure, New York once had the edge on impending social collapse and the Third World is still a prime contender as the starting gate for the Four Horsemen. But L.A. now has the End of Time thing signed, sealed and delivered.

Just check out such movies as Strange Days and Escape From L.A.. In each, LaLaLand has become a wasted Sodom barely fit for wild dogs and movie producers. Even a dead man might have second thoughts about traversing such a demented landscape.

Then again, Los Angeles may only be fit for the dead. At least that is the underlining attitude in The Crow: City of Angeles. Less a sequel than an elaborate reworking of the original Crow, City of Angeles manages to take the dark tone of the first film and push it further.

Too far, perhaps. The movie plays like a vindictive dirge at a black mass hosted by the manic depressive set. In its weird mix of punk nihilism and spiritual redemption, The Crow: City of Angeles achieves a sense of visual stylization that far exceeds its limited narrative grasp. But that alone already places it well ahead of its current competition in the Gotterdammerung category.

Despite the lingering controversy over the bizarre accidental death of Brandon Lee during filming of the first Crow, the second movie has managed to find a reasonable way to both reference and connect with the original. The young Sarah is now an adult (Mia Kirshner) and has moved to Los Angeles in a failed attempt to escape from the post-industrial rot of Detroit. Plying her trade as a tattoo artist, Sarah discreetly wears a pair of crow's wings on her back and is haunted by nightmares involving a man and his son being gunned down by a nightmarish band of aging rockers.

But the murders are no dream. Ashe (Vincent Perez) and his son are inadvertent witnesses to a gang slaying ordered by Judah(Richard Brooks) and his henchmen have strict policies about not leaving any clients for the Federal Witness Protection Program. Since Judah is some sort of unexplained mix of new age gangster and fallen angel, he fear no mortal agent. Only a force from beyond life can harm him, which Ashe is more than happy to do once he returns from the dead.

At which point, The Crow: City of Angeles becomes a strangely brooding combination of crypto-fascist fantasy and fin-de-siecle romanticism. Judah and his gang thrives upon calculated doses of extreme violence and sexual decadence (with enough S&M references to qualify as soft-core pornography), while Ashe and Sarah are two innocents with enough purity in their hearts to stock a convent. No wonder Curve (Iggy Pop), Judah's right hand man, finds them both baffling. Neither of these characters seem to have any place in a Los Angeles as hellish as the urban acid trip configured in the movie.

But while the plot of The Crow: City of Angeles settles into a dry recitation of Ashe's murderous hunt, the visuals (and music soundtrack) takes off in their own highly charged direction. The movie successfully takes the pop surrealism of the music video format and convert it into a sustained exercise that largely holds the viewers' attention. The film ironically approximates a drive-in movie made by Fellini while on a heroin rush. Framed within the context of the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration, the movie turns each killing into a quasi-religious ritual.

The Crow: City of Angeles will not be to many people's taste. But then, neither was the original. Likewise, the movie's last stretch turns dopey as it scrambles for an ending. Even within its own mystical universe, the film's final reel defies rational explanation.

But the real achievement of The Crow: City of Angeles is its odd ability to sustain a long, lingering chord of dark otherworldly angst. It plays like a rough night on the far side of the moon, which means that it successfully captures at least one aspect of contemporary Los Angeles. It remains a city of dreams, both good and
bad.