CROW VS. CROW

Vincent Perez - who replaces the late Brandon Lee in the controversial sequel to the Crow - is having a little double trouble.

It's a role most actors would kill for - the starring role in a splashy summer sequel with a built-in cult audience.  Only problem:  this particular role has been known to kill back.

So when Vincent Perez, the incredibly charming Swiss-born star of The Crow sequel , stopped by our studio recently, the interview began on a black note. Neither he nor the producers of this August's The Crow: City of Angels - stressing City of Angels in his slightly flustered English - were trying to replace Brandon Lee, who died in an accidental shooting during the filming of the 1994 original.

"It's a different character," he says, staring at us with the intensity of a hypnotist (or a European).  "Completely."

But with the Internet already abuzz with speculation, gripes and weird Brandon Lee prayers from anxious Crow fans, the question just won't go away.   "Who is Vincent Perez and how could he take on such a notorious role?"

On the one hand, actors have successfully reinterpreted highly franchised characters before (Val Kilmer's Batman, for instance).  On the other, there's clearly something more untouchable and angst-provoking about The Crow.  Here's a look at some of the debates in which Perez is embroiled.

LEE VS. PEREZ

In some ways, Brandon Lee was a cult figure waiting to happen.   Unlike Perez, he came to The Crow with a death-tinged pedigree that seemed to destine him for the role.  At the time, he was pigeonholed as a minor action-hero, considered lucky to costar opposite Dolph Lundgren's 1991 Showdown in Little Tokyo.   His outstanding characteristics were an intense need to succeed, a pumalike agility and a rather weird sense of his own mortality, all of which fed into his performance - and the cult of his untimely death.

When he signed on for The Crow, Brandon was trying to escape from the shadow of his father, actor/martial actor Bruce Lee, whose sudden death (while filming Game of Death) in 1973 has spawned all kinds of loony tales of Chinese sorcery, narcotics and intrigue.

Brandon, who owned a vintage Cadillac hearse, often rambled on about death and dying.  An excerpt from his last interview:

"Because we do not know when we will die, we got to think of life as an inexhaustible well, and yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really... How many more times will you watch a full moon rise?   Perhaps twenty, and yet it all seems limitless."

Lee (then 28) was killed on March 31, 1993, in a Carolco studio in Wilmington, North Carolina.  The tip of a "dummy" bullet (a nonexplosive fake used to film close-ups of a firearm being loaded) was accidentally left in a prop gun.  On the fateful day, a blank was inserted in the same gun and "fired," propelling the dummy tip into Lee's body.

Though a highly publicized investigation followed (and rumors persist that Lee was murdered to "fulfill" the prophecy of Game of Death, a film starring his dad, Bruce Lee), no one was charged.

Crow mania predates the first film.  Artist James O'Barr created the best-selling Crow comic books in the early 1980s as a form of therapy after his girlfriend was murdered.  Inspired by sources as varied as Iggy Poop and Nathaniel Hawthorne, O'Barr took an established comic theme - the hero who avenges his loved ones' death - and added a dark, millennial twist: the hero himself is a goner.

Vincent Perez, if not destined to play The Crow, is an excellent choice, we think.  A classically-trained veteran of 15 European films, including the art-house hit, Queen Margot, he may not labor under a family curse, but he did knock off a crow as a child, and can give you the creeps when he does this thing with his eyes.   In fact, we feel kind of bad subjecting him to this whole (compare! compare!) business, because he's clearly his own man.  But you don't know that yet and you're wondering.