The Raven

In The Raven, we get a fictionalized look at the final days of Edgar Allan Poe, where he is a penniless and drunk shadow of his former glory, called in by the police to help solve a crime involving a series of murders based around his stories. A premise like this calls for a hammy and overblown touch, one which the movie sometimes supplies, but not enough. Oddly enough, director James McTeigue (V For Vendetta) wants us to take this seriously.

John Cusack plays Poe, and it's a performance at war with itself. Sometimes, he wants to cut loose, eyes bulged, and screaming his lines, as if he is somehow channeling the spirit of Nicholas Cage. All too often, however, his performance is dour and serious. The Edgar Allan Poe portrayed in this movie hangs out with a pet raccoon, fights crime, and has a knack for deduction that rivals Sherlock Holmes. Why did Cusack feel the need to rope his performance in? Now that I think about it, the whole movie suffers from the same problem as the lead performance. It's constantly at war with itself. It wants to be grisly and violent, but it is never shocking enough. It wants to be a tense mystery thriller, but it is not smart enough. At times, it seems to be trying to have fun with itself, but then it goes right back to taking itself far too seriously. This is a movie suffering from a major identity crisis.

So, there's a mysterious masked killer kidnapping people, and killing them off in elaborate traps and set ups based on Poe's stories, such as The Pit and Pendulum or The Tell-Tale Heart. With a little more effort on the part of the filmmakers, the killer could have been passed off as a 19th Century ancestor to the Jigsaw killer from the Saw movies. Poe is brought in on the case by Detective Fields (Luke Evans), who initially suspects the author is behind the crimes, but soon realizes he needs his help. The two must decipher a series of clues that the killer leaves behind at each crime scene. It becomes even more personal when the woman Poe loves, the beautiful young Emily (Alice Eve) is kidnapped by the killer, and they must solve the crimes before she becomes a victim herself.

The ad campaign for The Raven is built around the killer's deadly traps, and seems to hint at something violent and shocking. But, for the most part, this is a plodding and uninvolved mystery built around Poe and Fields racing around 19th Century Baltimore, trying to piece the clues together. With all the running around, and the racing to save Emily before she is killed by one of the madman's traps, you would think that the movie would be able to create some kind of tension. However, the action is low key. Not even the mystery behind the killer's identity manages to create much excitement, as it's fairly easy to figure out if you know the basic rule of murder stories, in that the character or characters who keep on appearing throughout the story, but don't seem to have anything to do with what's going on are usually the ones you should be focusing on. Not only is the killer easy to identify, but the ultimate reveal and the motivations are fairly mundane instead of shocking.

What it all boils down to is that this is a generic serial killer movie dressed up in slightly fancier garb. The use of Poe as a main character, and the references in both the plot and the dialogue to his classic stories gives the movie an interesting hook, but when it's all over, we really just have the kind of "hunt down a madman" thriller that we have seen one too many times. Some movies know how to overcome this burden, but The Raven is not such a film. It sticks too close to tradition, and to things that have worked in the past. It's tame when it should be wild, and tepid when it should be surprising. It just ends up hitting one too many familiar notes with its plot and characters.

That's not to say the movie is not without its charms. I smiled when Poe wearily proclaimed, "If I had known my would would have such an influence on people, I would have devoted more time to eroticism". The Raven is watchable, and never becomes the train wreck it could have been, but it's refusal to take chances cost it dearly with me.

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