Rupert Sanders goes back to the comic book series with a different take on the dark supernatural journey of love and revenge, also starring FKA Twigs and Danny Huston.

Alex Proyas’ 1994 film The Crow owes its enduring cult bona fides partly to high-style visuals rooted in peak-era MTV, a churning alt-metal soundtrack and way cool goth-chic fashion sense. But the larger factor behind the sleek thriller’s cultural imprint was the tragic accident during filming that took the life of promising star Brandon Lee at 28, echoing the death at a similarly young age of his father, martial arts legend Bruce Lee. Director Rupert Sanders attempts to slip out from under the original’s shadow by avoiding the word “remake” and calling this a modern reimagining of the source material. That doesn’t make it any less turgid.

Proyas and his screenwriters zipped through the gruesome killings of soon-to-be-wed Shelly and Eric with disturbing montage flashes, allowing them to dive swiftly into the lurid fun of resurrection and bloody revenge.

In fact, the villainous side of things here barely makes sense. Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston) is a man of enormous wealth with a taste for pretty female pianists, which seems of interest only because we see Shelly doodling at a keyboard. He gets his kicks sending women to hell with a devilish whisper in their ear and a little blood contamination, prompting them to turn dead-eyed before committing suicide or murder.

But where does this diabolical mind-manipulation power come from, and what made Roeg such a sicko creep? He says he’s been around for centuries, but if we’re to believe he’s a supernatural being of some kind, hatched from the same comic-strip mythology as Dead Eric, why is his skill set so different? Don’t expect answers to those questions. Whatever he is, Roeg is no substitute for Michael Wincott as a heartless cokehead with a silky sheath of chest-length headbanger hair and Bai Ling as his witchy consort.

In this version, Eric and Shelly meet in court-ordered rehab. She freaked out prior to her arrest when a friend sent her a video he secretly shot during a hangout that turned ugly and left her traumatized. The terrible events of that night are only suggested at first, but we know they are sufficiently incriminating to make Roeg want the video removed from circulation pronto. That leaves just enough time for Eric and Shelly to compare tattoos, develop incipient feelings for one another and escape rehab together when Roeg’s kill team, led by an elegant pair we’ll just call Fake Tilda Swinton and Fake Terence Stamp, track her down.

When Eric and Shelly get home, they find Roeg’s hitmen waiting for them. Sanders and the writers have wisely scrapped the sadistic rape element from the first movie and show less interest in sensationalizing the murders. It’s probably the last smart decision they make.

Nobody encountering The Crow for the first or the 50th time needs too much fussy lore to slow down the action. It should be relatively straightforward: Dude dies alongside his beloved and reemerges from the grave with rapid-healing powers that render him seemingly unkillable; a crow guides him to take out the evildoers that took Shelly from him, allowing them both to rest in peace.

Here, Eric’s afterlife revenge odyssey begins in a swampy industrial wasteland between heaven and hell where an enigmatic character named Kronos (Sami Bouajila) reads him the rule book. The crows hanging about, caw-cawing up a racket, are tasked with carrying souls to the land of the dead. But Eric has unfinished business. “The crow will guide you to put the wrong things right,” Kronos tells him.