lex Corvis (Mabius) is celebrating his 21st birthday by preparing to die. He's been convicted of the murder of his girlfriend, Lauren Randall (O'Keefe), and he's going to the electric chair for it. Right up to the moment the switch is thrown, however, he maintains both his innocence and his love for Lauren.
Just as the shock hits his body, Alex glimpses among the witnesses to the execution a man with a zigzag scar on his arm. It was a man with this same scar who Alex claimed actually killed Lauren, but the authorities never believed he existed. Fortunately for Corvis, though, death doesn't mean that he can't still prove his innocence and avenge his lost love. In the prison morgue, Alex finds himself risen from the dead, possessing some decidedly superhuman powers, and with a mysterious black bird as his familiar. He then sets off to find his girlfriend's true killers, and those responsible for making him take the fall.
He discovers that this is going to be no simple task. Corvis learns that the men who killed Lauren were cops, dirty cops, and they were indeed the same people who set Alex up to take the rap for her murder. But the guilty men Alex finds (and kills) are mere pawns in the twisted game that led to Lauren's death--and he wants the king.
It looks as though Alex is going to have to enlist the aid of Lauren's sister, Erin Randall (Dunst), to help him in his quest, as the girls' father is somehow involved in the game, as is a menacing police captain (Ward) with whom Mr. Randall has dealings. The only problem is that Erin thinks Corvis is not only guilty of her sister's murder, but dead--which he is.
Flogging a dead bird--and franchise
For all the fans out there who were hoping that this third filmic Crow installment was going to resurrect the faltering franchise (which has suffered losses with the forgettable Crow: City of Angels sequel, a TV series that left the air as suddenly as it arrived, and a drought in the comics), The Crow: Salvation offers no rest for the wicked.
Salvation was originally supposed to be released theatrically back in 2000, and has ended up going direct-to-video only after a number of release delays. This fact, coupled with the fact that the movie's Web site pushes the (admittedly-good) soundtrack more than the film itself, should serve as grave warning signs.
The film starts decently enough. The scenes in which Corvis (won't they run out of corvine names soon?) realizes his powers and escapes from prison are somewhat exciting. There are some halfway-decent special/digital effects and action, and director Nalluri certainly does seem to know what he's doing at times, but these moments become more and more rare as the film progresses, eventually spiraling its way down to the lower realms of Bad Sequel Hell.
Eric Mabius' Alex (who looks much different from the protagonists of the first two films, though no better) is a character whose brooding and manic passion is more annoying, obnoxious and even ridiculous than it is believable or sympathetic. The ubiquitous Kirsten Dunst doesn't really bring much to her role--she's just kind of there yelling and crying and looking perplexed a lot. The rest of the cast looks equally stunned and uninterested. What can one expect, though, with such a horrendously written script?
The bad writing in this movie extends from the at-times-laughable dialogue to the plot, which eventually grows preposterous. Viewers who want to be kind might imagine that the screenplay underwent numerous rewrites--certain lines and even characters seem to be thrown into the story for no explicable reason, making a bad movie surreally bad. And the Gothic coolness of the original Crow movie has here simply been blown up into a higher gross-out factor and sex and violence that borders on the exploitative. Salvation this film is not.
