Comic book comes alive despite loss of star

Connections, connections. Alex Proyas' ("fictional")The Crow is so connected with real life and death, the hoards of levels of understanding are almost too close to the vest.

Connect the dots with this in mind. Crow creator (the films is adapted from a comic book series) James O'Barr is an ex-marine who created main character Eric Draven to personify his own grief over the violent death of his fiancee in Detroit. In the film adaptation, Draven dies with his future wife then in turn comes back from the dead to avenge the murder. Simple enough, but in real life, as The Crow was created by O'Barr out of therapeutic inspiration, some despair remains undone, for actor Brandon Lee was killed on the set by a malfunctioning stunt bullet.

This happened during the shooting of Draven's (Brandon Lee's character) death scene.

Had enough? Lee's father, martial-arts maestro Bruce Lee, was also killed on the set while filming Game of Death. Here Lee played an actor who is shot when hoodlums replace fake bullets with real ones. Spooky.

Now Brandon Lee's mother Linda Lee Caldwell and fiancee Eliza Hutton (Lee, like Draven, was engaged at the time of his death) want to let the film be an example of the late actor's best work.

With all of this in mind, the film is allowed to succeed on many levels: art imitating life, death imitating life, and film imitating comic books. As a film adaptation of a comic book, this movie has the look and feel of a comic book page without any cheesy over-the-top-ness. (Dick Tracy succeeded as "looking like something we've never seen." Thanks Madonna, but the film became more of a spectacle that grew exhaustingly old as the 3-D cartoon looked great and went nowhere).

This flick has more of the feel of reflection of the mass market of comic books - thoughtful and dreamy teens. Instead of cringing over quotes like, "My dad said childhood is over the moment you know you're going to die," and "It won't rain all the time," Lee's delivery gives the stuff that angsty teens' thoughts are made of. This kind of fantastic melodrama works.

As far as plot is concerned, the story is rather simple: Rocker Eric Draven comes back from the dead and avenges the rape and death of his fiancee, while being led by a crow who holds the power of reincarnation immortality. Draven seeks out and brutally kills the crime-hungry rogues while working his way up to the crime lord, Top Dollar (Michael Wincot), and his lover/ half-sister Myca (Bai Ling).

It is with these hoods that comedy erupts in the blackest way. Funboy (Michael Massee, the actor whose gun accidentally killed Lee) emerges as a pantheon of stupidity devoid of conscience who follows the masses like the stereotypical sidekick, Draven kills one druggie with an abundance of his own needles, and when Myca asks Top Dollar if the naked girl they just "had" in their bed is sleeping, he grins, "I think we broke her."

Along with this fast pace of dark wit, acrobatic action and the sensational direction of Proyas (who is best known for directing videos for INXS and Sting and fast-paced commercials for Nike), the film has a tornado for a soundtrack. With tracks from the Cure, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine, the Rollins Band, Stone Temple Pilots, Helmet, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and Medicine, just to name a few, each death is accentuated by a new haunting tune.

For those a bit skeptical of the despair of the lost poet-type comic book heroes and the cinematic validity of MTV-inspired film making, The Crow may be just the thing to open the mind and place an appreciation of this type of film within the recognition of the context in which it is made. That is, you feel as if you are actually "watching" a comic book. If that isn't enough, be reminded that this is the last chance to experience the true physical presence of the late Brandon Lee.