Now Available: The Raven

The Raven

Directed by James McTeigue

Starring John Cusack, Luke Evans, and Alice Eve

Rated R (bloody violence, disturbing images, brief language)     

     The Raven…boy, oh boy is this a contender for turd of the year. 

     The Raven is about Edgar Allan Poe, the world-famous author of horror and detective fiction, who finds himself embroiled in a murder mystery when somebody starts to copy his stories in an attempt to lure the author into a deadly game of wits. It’s too bad the movie is anything but witty.

     The first problem with this movie is the lead actor, John Cusack. He plays Poe as a violent, semi-romantic drunk spiteful towards all and completely haughty. Never once do we feel the darkness inside of Poe, instead the movie mistakes lots of drunken yelling for a “troubled soul.” It doesn’t at all capture the literary essence of Poe. The plotting and setup of the movie do it no justice, either.

     The film feels like Rolamd Emmerich’s cringe-inducing revisionist history epic “Anonymous” by way of the slick Hollywoodized bloodletting of the later films in the “Saw” series. It also attempts the whole murder mystery angle, going for a cat-and-mouse game we’re used to seeing Morgan Freeman or Jodie Foster run through the woods in, only now it’s in 1840s Maryland. James McTeigue, whose claim to fame “V for Vendetta’ seems to have been an anomaly, clumsily handles the director’s chair, using horrendous lighting that he also showcase in his earlier film “Ninja Assassin.” Certain shots, especially the action scenes, are horribly framed and edited, and certain moments that seem to be directing our attention to something in the background or foreground amount to absolutely NOTHING.

     Let’s talk about the script and the pacing. Both are bad, with the script needing a lot more…excitement. Everything is so by-the-books and rote. Nothing interesting happens, and the twists are either nonexistent or completely stupid. The film doesn’t realize that it has numerous idiosyncrasies that don’t make any logical sense and seem to be leading us to a conclusion that is totally obvious anyway. It’s no fun because there aren’t any clues to follow, just Poe finds a body, mentions his story, finds the clue that leads to another body, rinse and repeat. The “clue” segments that are supposed to be the “game of wits’ moments give way to mediocre revelations and more drunken yelling most of the time. It lacks intensity and the kind of calculating griminess that a hand like David Fincher could do.

     It’s just a boring movie with nothing interesting to say or show and virtually no thrills or scares. It feels as inconsequential as your standard badly-written modern-day crime thriller that Nicolas Cage or Sam Worthington might star in nowadays, and surely shares the same overly-shiny Hollywood production quality ill-fitting of 19^th century Baltimore. The CGI is obtrusive and obvious. The final act is a moment of sheer cinematic triviality when we learn the hilariously stereotypical reason behind the killings and we are left with an unsatisfying conclusion that attempts to intertwine fiction and reality in a cumbersome display of ineptitude. 

     I just can’t stand a movie so content on not trying anything new or exciting, deliberately towing a genre line and doing so badly at that. If you are a fan of Gothic fiction, skip this. Tim Burton’s “Batman Returns’ has better Gothic imagery than this. If you’re a fan of crime thriller, re-watch “Silence of the Lambs.” Move along, nothing good to see here.

D