In a multi-part series, Comic Book Film Editor William Gatevackes will be tracing the history of comic book movies from the earliest days of the film serials to today’s big blockbusters and beyond. Along with the history lesson, Bill will be covering some of the most prominent comic book films over the years and why they were so special. This time, we’ll talk about three “superhero” films that offer a bit of metacommentary on comic books and the real world.

After The Sixth Sense, M. Night Shyamalan could do no wrong. That film was a surprise success, and its twist ending had many people comparing Shyamalan to Alfred Hitchcock in the kindest of terms. All of Hollywood was looking to do business with the director, and they were willing to let him do whatever he wanted.

Fortunately, Shyamalan had written a spec script during post-production of that film, a script that Touchstone Pictures bought for a record-setting $5 million (the most paid to that point for a spec script). Audiences and critics eagerly awaited this new Shyamalan film, expecting it to be a psychological thriller along the lines of The Sixth Sense. What they got was something entirely different.

Unbreakable wasn’t just a superhero movie, but rather a deconstruction of the superhero mythos. It went one step beyond transporting the Superman archetype to a more realistic setting by becoming a quasi-psychological examination of comic book tropes and trademarks.

The film focuses on David Dunn (Bruce Willis), an unemployed security guard who survives a horrific train wreck, one which killed all of the other 131 passengers on the train. Soon after, he is contacted by Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), a comic book fan who believes Dunn is a superhuman come to life. Price leads Dunn down a path of self-discovery, which results in a sinister revelation at the end of the film.

The comic book tropes are all over the film, starting with the protagonist’s alliterative name. David Dunn calls to mind a long line of comic book character’s alter egos (Peter Parker, Bruce Banner, Lois Lane, Lana Lang, Lex Luthor, etc). Much like Superman with Kryptonite and Green Lantern with the color yellow, Dunn finds a weakness that strips him of his powers (It just happens to be water. GL is the butt of many jokes by being able to be neutralized by a banana peel, imagine a superhero who was useless when it rains. Shyamalan reused the weakness for the aliens in Signs, which was even sillier. Why try to conquer a planet that is two-thirds covered in the stuff that can kill you? But I digress…). And Dunn’s arch-enemy is his polar opposite—like Batman, bastion of order, having to tangle with the anarchic Joker, or the physically powerful alien Superman having to constantly fight the intellectually gifted, albeit completely human, Lex Luthor, the indestructible Dunn must contend with a man with a rare bone disease that makes his bones incredibly fragile.

Unbreakable did well at the box office, but disappointing in comparison to The Sixth Sense. This can be chalked up to the ad campaign for the film, which tried to portray it as a psychological thriller in the mold of Shyamalan’s first film.

As it stands, Unbreakable is an example of the way that the world of comics have influenced filmmakers. Two years later, we would see a comic book creator become a filmmaker.

James Robinson, like Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman before him, was a British writer who made a big splash in America by reimagining a long-standing DC Comics character. Moore’s character, as we already mentioned, was Swamp Thing. Gaiman’s was the Sandman. Robinson made his name revamping Starman. Starman, like Sandman, was a character first created in the Golden Age of Comics (in 1941 to be exact) who was revamped and refigured into a number of different versions before finally hitting the right one. Robinson’s Starman was the son of the original, a reluctant hero who wrestled with family baggage as often as he did with the bad guys.

Calling Starman one of the best comic books to come out of the 1990s is the textbook definition of a backhanded compliment. The decade was known as a pit of bloated excess, marketing gimmicks and quantity over quality. However, Starman was one of the few comic books to come out of that era that truly deserved to be called great.

The comic book series ended in 2001 and Robinson moved on to Hollywood. In 2002, he wrote and directed Comic Book Villains, a film that spent about 15 seconds in theaters if that long. It wasn’t a superhero film at all, but comic books provided the MacGuffin that propelled the film’s crime noir plot along. The film centered on a collection of valuable comics dating all the way back to the Golden Age. The collector died and two rival comic book stores vie to get the expensive books by any means necessary. Unfortunately, the collector’s mom refuses to sell. As the owners of each store try to change the woman’s mind, their competition for the books soon turns nasty…and quite deadly.

Robinson’s script presented the story with dollops of black comedy and heaping helpings of the dark side of human nature.  His cast might not have been A-list, but it was beyond great. Character actors such as Donal Logue, D.J. Qualls, Eileen Brennan and Cary Elwes fill in the leads and make their characters at once likeable and detestable. It’s well worth a look if you come across it on Netflix or if you have room on an Amazon gift card.

The final film we are going to talk about today takes the idea of applying realism to the superhero tropes to a new level, employing a popular style of filmmaking.

The “found footage” genre exploded in popularity in 1999 with the release of The Blair Witch Project, the film that became the trademark of the genre. That movie introduced the conceit that what you were seeing on screen was real, culled from footage filmed by the characters in the film, typically found after something awful happened to them. This conceit usually appears in horror films, where the pseudo-realism adds a creepy sense of dread to the scares. However, it was applied to the superhero genre with 2012’s Chronicle.

In this case, the found footage was taken by the three teens who gained telekinetic powers after coming in contact with a strange, radioactive rock. It chronicled their exploits in using their powers, which typically involved playing cruel tricks on unsuspecting townsfolk. It also documented the corrupting influence these newfound powers had on one of their members as he spiraled out of control into pure evil.

This was deconstructing the idea of superpowers for the YouTube generation. It tapped into the fact that if kids nowadays gained superpowers, they would not immediately go out and track down bank robbers. They’d get their laughs by scaring little girls in toy stores by making the stuffed animals appear to come to life. And they’d record it, not because their powers are amazing, but rather because they were recording their life any way and their origin just happened. Even without the “found footage” conceit, it would have been a realistic portrayal. The conceit just added another layer of realism.

Next up, we’ll look at some kid friendly films that examine the superhero, including one of the best superhero films of all time (and one of the worst).

1. G.I.Joe Retaliation (Paramount, 3,719 Theaters, 110 Minutes,Rated PG-13): So, the weather isn’t even warm yet and we already have our first summer blockbuster. Unfortunately, it’s from the summer of 2012.

That’s when the film was supposed to come out. But last May, just a month before the film was supposed to hit theaters and with marketing tie-ins already starting to roll out, Paramount pulled the plug on the release. They said it was so the film could be converted into 3-D, but industry wags claimed that it was done for other reasons, everything from rewriting Channing Tatum’s character’s death out of the film or just to avoid Tatum’s Magic Mike (although that excuse seems flimsy when you consider Dwayne Johnson has 15 other films coming out this year).

The sequel deals with how the team reacts after Cobra takes over the U.S. Government and makes the Joes public enemy #1.

I was a minority who actually liked the first film, so I can’t wait to see what they do now.Not all of the original cast is back, but the addition of Johnson and Bruce Willis more than make up for it.

There are things you need to have to get a great action film, and there are things you need to get to get a great Die Hard film. The lists are not mutually exclusive. A Good Day to Die Hard has a lot of elements necessary to make a great action film, but comes up a bit lacking when it comes to being a great Die Hard film.

John McClane (Bruce Willis), perhaps inspired by fixing his relationship daughter in Live Free or Die Hard (said daughter is once again played in a cameo in this film by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, providing a small bit of continuity with the last film), decides to mend bridges with his son Jack (Jai Courtney). Unfortunately, Jack has been arrested in Russia for murder. Papa McClane hops on the next flight to the country to see how he can help.

The elder McClane arrives in Russia just in time to see the courthouse his son is being arraigned at come under attack. He notices his son leaving the courthouse with another prisoner named Yuri Komarov (Sebastian Koch). John’s intervening in his son’s escape causes the son, secretly a CIA agent, miss his chance to get the Komarov, a political dissident with a file on a powerful member of the Russian cabinet,  out of the country. Feeling responsible, John and Jack join together to complete the son’s mission. Of course, nothing is ever easy for John McClane, and the mission takes a whole bunch of deadly twists and turns. Deadly as in weapons grade uranium.

On one hand, the film works well as an absurdly dumb action flick. The stunts are inventive and imaginative–a car chase in this film involves one car driving OVER other cars–and the villains are suitably dastardly. But don’t think too much about how if Jack’s extraction plan can be derailed by a 40 second talk with his father, then it wasn’t much of a plan to begin with. Or about how our two heroes can walk into Chernobyl (yes, THAT Chernobyl), a place where it is established by the hazmat suit-wearing bad guy’s hi-tech geiger counters that it is still teeming with dangerous radiation, wearing only a leather jacket and a combat vest. But if you buy into the premise, you’ll buy the bit. If you buy the fact that a SUV can run an armored personnel carrier off the road, you can buy the heroes laughing off getting every form of cancer in alphabetical order with a quip here and there.

But it’s not so hard to overlook where it fails as a Die Hard movie. It has been well established that McClane has a crappy relationship with his family. But this film is simply playing off that without showing us why this particular relationship with his son is so bad. Jack has a vicious animosity towards his dad, but we never really know why other than the fact that John was never around. Since we don’t know what built up the hurdle between the two in the first place, their inevitable reconnection as bullets fly seems hollow.

As is expected with the franchise, we do get a swerve when it comes to the villain. But since the villain is so poorly drawn before we see his change of colors, that revelation doesn’t have the kick that it should.

And here’s a note to screenwriter Skip Woods, director John Moore, or Bruce Willis–whoever came up with the idea to have McClane say some variation of “I’m on vacation” every 20 minutes. We understand you are trying to tap into the “Come out to the coast, we’ll have a few laughs” vibe of the original, but what you really call to mind is Dante’s “I’m not even supposed to be here today” lament from Clerks.

If you are able to turn off your mind and forget this is a Die Hard film, you might be in for some cheesy fun. If you are not, well, expect disappointment.

1. A Good Day to Die Hard (Fox, 3,552 Theaters, 97 Minutes, Rated R): There was 12 years between Die Hard with a Vengeance and Live Free or Die Hard. There was a little under six years between that one and this one. So, by that count, does that mean Die Hard 6 will hit in 2016?

Well, a sixth volume has been confirmed so why the heck not? So what if Bruce Willis will be in his sixties when it comes out or that the character in that installment will bear little resemblance to the character in this film, let alone the original. The concept is evergreen and adaptable to every type of story. The only thing that needs to happen is that the story needs to get bigger.

This time around, we are introduced to John McClane Jr in, of all places, Russia. Daddy has gone over there to straighten his son out. Turns out that Junior is a government operative investigating the sale of nuclear weapons. Things turn hairy, as they do whenever papa is around, and the two must team up to save the world and bring in the bad guys.

2. Safe Haven (Relativity, 3,223 Theaters,115 Minutes, Rated PG-13): What is Valentine’s Day with out a romance? And I guess a Nicholas Sparks adaptation meets the barest minimum requirement.

Sparks’ brand of treacly, star-crossed lover starring romance novels have been hitting the big screen since 1999′s Message in the Bottle (bet you didn’t know that was one of his) but really hit the big time with 2004′s The Notebook, which, along with his abs, is the main reason why women find Ryan Gosling so dreamy. The success of that movie has caused producers to scour Sparks’ back catalogue for more weepy romances to bring to the big screen.

This one seems to owe a lot to 1991′s Julia Roberts vehicle, Sleeping With the Enemy. Julianne Hough (see, even the name is similar) plays a woman who relocates to a sleepy North Carolina town. She is constantly looking over her shoulder, waiting for someone to over take her, all the while trying not to make any contact with any of her fellow neighbors and townsfolk. That doesn’t last long as the sensitive and hunky Josh Duhamel breaks down her guard and makes her want to love again. But, unfortunately, her past catches up with here. Here’s where the films diverge–she’s not being stalked by an abusive husband, but and obsessive policeman! See, she might have killed a man in her hometown of Boston. Okay, you know she really didn’t do it, but yet that’s is what she is running from.

What shocking is the shlock is directed by Oscar-nominated Lasse Hallström. What’s even more shocking is that its his second Sparks adaptation! What is the world coming to?

3. Beautiful Creatures (Warner Brothers, 2,950 Theaters, 124 Minutes, Rated PG-13): Oh, look. It’s a gender-reversed Twilight with witches instead of vampires! Only with more Oscar winners/nominees!

I’d imagine that the producers of this film would take umbrage to this comparison if that’s they whole impression they were trying to sell. This film is intended to be the first installment of a franchise based on a successful book franchise (one which was getting a lot of promotion at last year’s New York Comic Con). I’m sure they hope that a lot of Twi-hards become BeaCreaFreaks™ and spend inordinate amounts of cash on Beautiful Creatures merchandise and movie tickets.

This film focuses on a young girl who just happens to belong to a family of witches. Her sixteenth birthday is coming up and that’s when her witchly powers are going to be amped up. But will she become a good witch or a bad witch? The family moves to a small town in the hopes of nudging her to the good side. But a relationship with a muggle…er…non-magical human might tip the balance in the other direction.

Back when the most recent Die Hard film, A Good Day To Die Hard, I joked that given star Bruce Willi’s statement that each successive installment of the action franchise needs to be bigger in scope, the only logical step for a further film would be Die Hard Versus Predator. Well, we’re going to get to see how much of a prognostication my joke will be.

When asked on the BBC’s One Show last night if there was going to be another installment of the successful action series, Willis simply responded – “Yes.”

 Willis didn’t elaborate any further and I honestly don’t think that there isn’t much actual development happening until the execs at the studio take a look at the box office numbers when the film opens next week. Though I have no doubt that they won’t be small enough to discourage discussion about a sixth film. 

Via Bleeding Cool.

Happy Valentine’s Day action lovers. February 14 will be the day that the latest in the Die Hard franchise, A Good Day To Die Hard, opens in theaters. Bruce Willis is back as tough guy cop John McClane, this time joined by his son Jack (Jai Courtney) to stop the terrorist plot du jour. Here’s the first full-length trailer for the film.

A couple of quick thoughts, first being that the trailer confirms the rumor from back in August of Mary Elizabeth Winstead reprising her role of Lucy McClane for at least a small cameo in the film.

Also noteworth is the return of the use of one of the main themes from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, harkening back to the first and third Die Hard movies.

And if you’re wondering why McClane is in Russia, well here’s the studio’s official ploy synopsis to clue you in -

Iconoclastic, take-no-prisoners cop John McClane, for the first time, finds himself on foreign soil after traveling to Moscow to help his wayward son Jack–unaware that Jack is really a highly-trained CIA operative out to stop a nuclear weapons heist. With the Russian underworld in pursuit, and battling a countdown to war, the two McClanes discover that their opposing methods make them unstoppable heroes.

1. Argo (Warner Brothers, 3,250+ Theaters, 120 Minutes, Rated R): Based a formerly classified, hard-to-believe-if-it-was fiction true story, the film tells the tale of a rescue mission set in the days of the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Six embassy members managed to escape the embassy take over and take residence in the Canadian Embassy. The CIA hatches a plan to get them out–they’ll pose as a Canadian film crew scouting locations. The embassy workers will pose as part of the Canadian crew. The only problem is that the Iranians are very suspicious and if the embassy workers are caught, they are dead.

While ”Argo” is fake,the CIA based it on an abandoned adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s novel, Lord of Light. It got to the pre-production stages, with comic book legend Jack Kirby doing design drawings for the film. So, while Ben Affleck won’t be directing the Justice League film, he at least has done another film with a connection, tenuous though it may be, with comics.

2. Here Comes The Boom (Sony/Columbia, @3,000 Theaters, 105 Minutes, Rated PG): Kevin James is turning into a thinking man’s Adam Sandler. Now, wait! Hear me out on this!

Paul Blart: Mall Cop, for some, was a silly exercise in seeing a fat man trip over stuff. I saw it as a witty parody of the Die Hard-type films with Kevin James as the fat guy who trips over stuff recast in the Bruce Willis role. If it was just the former, I probably would have joined the naysayers who didn’t like it. As the latter, I liked it quite a bit.

I did not see The Zookeeper, so I can’t comment on that one, but this film appears to be a return to form. Come to see the fat guy get pummeled repeatedly, stay to see a subversive parody of the “Inspirational Teacher” and “Underdog Sports” genres.

3. Sinister (Summit Entertainment, @2,500 Theaters, 110 Minutes, Rated R): Hey, horror fans! Stop me when this sounds familiar. A family moves into a new house and…

What? Stop there? But I haven’t even gotten to the fact that dad’s a writer and the evil box of film he found which releases an evil entity that threatens his family!

Yeah, this film is Frankenstein construction of parts of better films. You don’t need a screenwriter for this, all you need is a computer program. And not even a new computer. You can run it on a dusty old Commodore 64 from the 80s.

The reason why films like The Cabin in the Woods and Scream take such a hold in the horror fandom is because the conventions they mock are ground into dust by films like these. Sure, there will probably be scares in this film, but only because the scene was scary in an earlier film. We need sick bastards to create original horror, not people to rip off the sick bastards that came before them.

4. Seven Psychopaths (CBS Films, @1,475 Theaters, 109 Minutes, Rated R): Speaking of sick bastards, let me present you with Martin McDonagh. I believe me when I say that in this case I mean “sick bastard” as the highest compliment.

McDonagh is one of my most favorite writers. I followed his writing from the stage to the screen, and have been impressed by his talent and ability all along the way. His writing is not for all tastes. He blends the wacky with the gruesome, the pathetic with the fearsome, into a dark comedy brew with great characters, excellent dialog and more than its fair share of heart.

If you are adventurous, and can see only one film this week, and if it playing near you, go see this film. If it wasn’t for a little thing called New York Comic Con, I would be seeing it at Friday’s first showing. But even without seeing, I know it has the best potential to be the best film this weekend.

1. Hotel Transylvania (Sony/Columbia, 3,349 Theaters, 91 Minutes, Rated PG): See, I’m conflicted about this one. I have a natural aversion to any film that features both Adam Sandler and David Spade in it, even if they are only providing voices. However, Genndy Tartakovsky has done Samurai Jack and the Star Wars: The Clone Wars TV cartoons, some quality stuff.

When it’s this much of a toss up,I go to the plot: Dracula’s idyllic life running a resort for monsters looking for a break from humanity comes to an end when his hotel is discovered by a human boy. No, it’s not that the secret is out, it’s because the boy develops feelings for Drac’s teenage daughter.

It is a unique twist on a rather common premise. But it’s also Sandler and Spade.  If only there was a good time travel movie coming out this week instead.

2. Looper (TriStar, 2,992 Theaters, 118 Minutes, Rated R): What I love about this movie is that writer/director Rian Johnson came up with this film with the idea to cast his friend Joseph Gordon-Levitt. By some casting miracle, Bruce Willis decided to join the film as the future version of Gordon-Levitt’s character. One problem: They don’t look anything alike. So, even though he was with the project from the very beginning, Gordon-Levitt is the one going through hours of make-up to look like Willis and not the other way around, because, well, I guess Willis doesn’t wear make-up.

Of course, as good as the make-up is, it has the unfortunate disadvantage of having ample examples of how a younger Bruce Willis look easily available on Netflix. But Gordon-Levitt’s acting as a pseudo-Willis is spot on.

But what about the film? Oh, it is a futuristic thriller where Gordon-Levitt is a hitman for the mob. Only with a twist–the mob sends their victims back in time so there isn’t a dead body in their present day. Things go swimmingly until the assassin looks an older version of himself in the eye as his next victim.

3. Won’t Back Down (Fox, 2,515 Theaters, 121 Minutes, Rated PG): Let’s do the rundown, shall we? Hot button topic that is in the news today? Check. Two women fighting against all odds against an unmovable system? Check. Cast loaded with Oscar nominees and/or winners? Check. Based on a true story? Well, it says it was based on actual events, so, close enough. Check.

What we have here is an Oscar-bait movie that is also trying to be a financially successful film as well. Typically, films like these succeed in neither goal.

The film centers on a young mother (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who teams up with an educator (Viola Davis) to try to make their inner city school better.

In a multi-part series, Comic Book Film Editor William Gatevackes will be tracing the history of comic book movies from the earliest days of the film serials to today’s big blockbusters and beyond. Along with the history lesson, Bill will be covering some of the most prominent comic book films over the years and why they were so special. This time, we’ll look at the tragic comic book film that adapted a tragic comic book—The Crow.

The biggest thing that the comic book The Crow had in common with its film adaptation is the role tragedy played in the making of each of them. James O’Barr wrote and drew the first Crow miniseries as a way to escape the pain caused by his fiancée’s death, and The Crow film had a macabre shadow cast over it by the untimely death of its star, Brandon Lee, during production.

James and Beverly Ann were high school sweethearts that knew, even at that very young age, that they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. They became engaged to be married, a wedding that would come after they graduated high school.

That wedding would never come. Beverly Ann was killed by a drunk driver shortly before that anticipated graduation, in early 1978. As is often the case with young love, James had a hard time dealing with the loss. He enlisted in the Marines, hoping the stability of the military would take his mind off Beverly Ann. It didn’t. Seeking solace, he decided to put pen to paper. While stationed with the Marines in Germany, while working as an illustrator of military manuals, he read an article about a couple from his hometown of Detroit that were killed over a $20 engagement ring. Seeing a corollary between that tragic event and his own, he used it in 1981 as the framework for an origin story in a comic book that he hoped would allow him a cathartic release from his own pain and sadness.

The James in question is James O’Barr and that comic book is, of course, The Crow.

The original comic focused on Eric and his fiancée, Shelly. Just before they are about to be married, their car breaks down in a bad part of town. A drug-addled street gang comes across them and decides to have a little fun. They shoot Eric in the head while they brutally rape and beat Shelly. The gunshot leaves Eric paralyzed and dying, able to watch the torture Shelly is going through yet helpless to stop it. The gang leaves them by the side of the road, where they each die from their injuries.

One year later, a mystical crow resurrects Eric and offers him the chance at vengeance. Wearing harlequin makeup and dressed in black, Eric dubs himself The Crow, and begins the process of hunting down the gang members that killed him and Shelly.

You don’t have to be a psychologist to see what O’Barr was doing with this comic. There is anger, pain and sadness on every page. You can easily see the parallels between O’Barr’s life and Eric’s. Both lost the woman they loved in a senseless act of violence. Only O’Barr gives Eric a number of culprits to take out his anger and frustration, his sorrow and loss, on, a luxury O’Barr never had for himself.

Being that The Crow was somewhat hard to pigeonhole—too violent to be a gothic tale of revenge, too literate and morose to be your typical superhero comic—O’Barr had a hard time finding a publisher. It wasn’t until 1989, eight years after O’Barr started the comic, that Caliber Comics decided to put the book out.

The book was a cult hit. What Caliber, and later Tundra, Kitchen Sink, Image and IDW, realized that the other publishers didn’t was that there was something in The Crow that would resonate with readers beyond just a genre. The story was a doomed romance. It was about the pain of losing someone you cared about. It was anger at what was taken from you and the wish fulfillment of striking back at those who had hurt you the most. These qualities are more prevalent amongst people than one might care to admit, and O’Barr had given them all a voice.

With the successful cult comic came Hollywood offers. O’Barr sold the rights to four movies to Ed Pressman and Jeff Most. At first, the creator and the producers weren’t on the same page at all. At an early production meeting with movie executives, O’Barr was presented with their ideas for the film—one of which was a musical adaptation starring Michael Jackson. While the powers that be moved away from that horrible concept, the first few scripts that came in bore no resemblance to the comic at all. Things didn’t start turning around until director Alex Proyas and Brandon Lee came on board.

O’Barr originally had reservations about Lee’s casting, believing that it was another sign that the producers had no idea as to what to do with his comic book. Since Lee was Bruce Lee’s son and had starred in films like Showdown in Little Tokyo and Rapid Fire, two martial arts-ish action films, O’Barr thought The Crow was headed in the same direction. But Lee impressed the Crow’s creator by studying the original comics to such a point that the actor could quote lines from it back to O’Barr.

The Crow was a risky venture for Brandon Lee, one he really didn’t need to take. His name and parentage could garner him a career in the martial arts action film with little or no effort. But his charm, charisma and talent allowed him to make the most of his opportunities. If he stayed in the B-level action film, he could have a long and productive career, whether in the smaller low-budget films (like Dolph Lundgren and Michael Dudikoff), big budget blockbusters (like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis) or somewhere in between (like Steven Segal and Chuck Norris).

But Lee was trained as an actor at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. He wanted a role that was more of a challenge, and the role of Eric Draven would give him just that. And his performance in the film very well could have propelled him to superstardom if tragedy didn’t strike.

Proyas and the crew scheduled all of the non-Crow parts of the movie, including Eric’s death, until the last few weeks of production to allow Brandon to have the last days of shooting be makeup free. One of the first scenes to be shot during this period, just 8 days before shooting was to wrap and three weeks before Lee was set to marry his fiancé, Eliza Hutton, was Eric’s murder. In a change from the comic, Funboy (Michael Massee) and his gang attack and kill Eric and Shelley in their home, acting on orders from their boss, Top Dollar (Michael Wincott). Massee was supposed to shoot Lee with a gun full of blanks just as he got back from a grocery run. And that’s what he did, with one horrible, fatal problem.

The gun Massee used was in a scene shot earlier that was to show it being loaded. Typically, dummy rounds are used in these types of scenes, as they look exactly like real rounds only with no primer, propellant or explosive charge. They have a bullet at the end of the round but there is no way for it to be fired because it is inert. For this scene, due to budgetary and time constraints and the fact that they were filming in North Carolina instead of Hollywood, the crew didn’t have access to dummy rounds. They instead jury rigged live rounds by removing the explosive charge and propellant. However, they left the primer in. If fired, there would not be enough force to have the bullet leave the barrel, but there would be enough force to lodge it in the barrel.

And that was what happened. At some point between the loading scene and Eric’s murder scene, while the modified rounds were still in the gun, someone pulled the trigger, which caused the bullet to get stuck in the barrel. Blanks consist of rounds that have primer, propellant and explosive charge held in by a wad of wax, wood or cotton, but no bullet. This is designed to give a realistic muzzle flash. As long as the blank is fired from a safe distance, they are harmless. But, due to the fact that they have the same firing power as a real round, if the blank is fired at a close enough distance, it could be fatal (as is what happened to Jon-Eric Hexum on the set of the TV series Cover Up, who, as a joke, held a gun containing blanks up to his temple and fired. The wad hit Hexum’s skull with enough power to send parts of his skull into his brain, resulting in brain death). And if there was a bullet lodged in the barrel, the round would then become essentially live ammunition.

When Massee fired the blank at Lee, it propelled the bullet in the barrel into Lee’s abdomen. The bullet perforated many of Lee’s internal organs, including his stomach, and ruptured a major artery, causing massive internal bleeding before lodging in his spine. It has been said that even if the accident took place in the emergency room of a hospital, there would have been  no way to save Lee.  Lee was pronounced dead at 1:04 pm on March 31, 1993. He was 28 years old.

Brandon Lee’s death would have been tragic under any circumstances. If the firearms expert had been there, he would have checked the barrel. If Massee aimed just a few inches to the right, this would have been avoided. Add to the fact that his father died at the age of 32 and his death has been the focus of a number of conspiracy theories (Killed by the Triads? A supernatural curse?) and the accident that killed Brandon took on an entirely different dimension. Add to that the fact that Brandon was killed while filming his character’s death and his character was set to marry his true love if he wasn’t killed, and Brandon’s death becomes all the more unusual.

Brandon Lee’s death, as horrible and as callous as I feel saying it, makes The Crow a better film. The fact that you are watching the best performance Brandon Lee ever made as the last performance he ever made adds an almost unbearable sense of melancholy to the film. And since the story is melancholic to begin with, the tragedy enhances the mood of the film. The sadness I feel for Brandon Lee’s death parallels the sadness his character, Eric Draven, is experiencing on screen, therefore it’s easier to get drawn into the film.  The tragedy transforms the film into an entirely different experience. I don’t know if the film would have been as successful, either critically or financially, if Brandon Lee survived the process.

But since the film was a success and the producers had the option for three sequels if they chose, they went into production on a follow up, 1996’s The Crow: City of Angels.

Director Tim Pope (known mostly for his music videos) and writer David S. Goyer (writing the first of what would be many comic book adaptations) fought with Miramax over the tone of the film, Pope and Goyer wishing to honor Lee by making the film as different as can be, Miramax wanting characters from the first film such as Sarah and the resurrected Top Dollar, to be included in the sequel. Pope and Goyer included Sarah as a peace offering, but lost out in the end as the studio recut the finished film after the fact to make it more tonally similar to the first film. If continuing with production on The Crow was a tribute to Brandon Lee, what Miramax did with this film is the equivalent of grave robbing.

After that, the law of diminishing returns came into effect. There would be two more sequels: 2000’s The Crow: Salvation in which an executed convict falsely convicted of killing his girlfriend comes back as the Crow, and 2005’s The Crow: Wicked Prayer, which featured a Native American ex-con who is killed along with his girlfriend by Satanists only to come back for revenge. Neither film got much, if any, of a theatrical release and both have been widely panned by critics.

A remake of the first Crow film has been in the works since 2007, with Stephen Norrington originally attached to direct, later to be replaced by 28 Weeks Later’s  Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. Bradley Cooper was rumored to be in talks for the lead, but the project appears to be headed towards legal wrangling between current production company holders Relativity and distributors The Weinstein Group over who has the rights to distribute the movie. Tying the remake up in legal red tape might be the best thing to happen to it.

Next, things get a little lighter as we cover Jim Carrey’s first, and best, foray into portraying a comic book character.

1. The Words (CBS Films, 2,801 Theaters, 96 Minutes, Rated PG-13): Bradley Cooper is in danger of being typecast. However, this typecasting is a very specific and unique–he’s becoming the go-to guy for films about writers who become successful by disreputable means and who eventually run afoul of older men played by Oscar-winning actors.

In last year, it was Limitless, the disreputable means was a drug that increased his mental faculties, and the Oscar-winner was Robert De Niro. This time, his writer character becomes famous by stealing another man’s novel manuscript and passing it off as his own, causing him to come in conflict with the manuscript’s true author, played by Oscar-winner Jeremy Irons.

This is the second film in the past month that Bradley Cooper starred in that was written and directed by longtime friends of the actor (see Hit and Run). While that’s a commendable use of his fame, I wish his friends had better material for him to work with.

2. The Cold Light of Day (Summit Entertainment, 1,511 Theaters, 93 Minutes, Rated PG-13): And then, we have this one, which, to be honest, I knew next to nothing about before I started writing this post. That’s never a good sign.

But what I could find out from the Internet, this film is about a Wall Street trader (new Superman Henry Cavill) whose family is kidnapped while vacationing in Spain. Turns out, the Wall Street trader (an occupation that just SCREAMS action hero) is the son of a CIA agent (Bruce Willis) who made off with a very important MacGuffin, er, briefcase that a lot of shady people want to get their hands on. Now, the bad guys want the briefcase in exchange for the trader’s family.

Just want to point out that both films released this week onlt add up to a 25% fresh rating COMBINED over at Rotten Tomatoes. Granted, that’s only with about 50 reviews in, but still. Even the Cleveland vs. Philadelphia game should be better than that.