The Raven (2012)
The premise of this film, set during the last few days in the life of Edgar Allen Poe, is to reveal what happened during those last days. Poe (John Cusack) is a penniless drunk with few friends, depending on money he gets from The Baltimore Times for writing disparaging reviews of other writers' work to keep him in the booze. Emily (Alice Eve) the woman he loves is difficult to reach because her father Colonel Hamilton (Brendan Gleeson) has a very understandable dislike of Poe, so we are supposed to accept the assertion that a young beautiful girl is head over hills in love with an older man, at the end of his career and is willing to sneak around behind her very wealthy father's back to see him. For some unexplained reason, Poe has a pet raccoon.
Detective Emmett Fields (Luke Evans) ascertains while investigating the brutal murders of a mother and her 12- year-old daughter in a locked room, that the crime scene has a striking resemblance to a mystery story that was just published in the local newspaper, Poe's 'Murders in the Rue Morgue'. He sends a squad of policemen out to bring Poe in for questioning. Upon being convinced that a psychotic serial killer has been using Poe's writings as inspiration. Although Fields doesn't believe Poe is responsible for the murders he is definitely connected to them. A second murder is discovered, this time based on the story The Pit and The Pendulum. As you might imagine this is a gruesome death, if you are aware of the story. If you're not, well, let's just say that the pendulum has an enormous blade on the end of it. This ushers the film in the direction of 'Poe' meets 'Saw', or in other words gratuitous gore. The victim the pendulum is a writer at The Baltimore Times who wrote highly negative reviews of Poe's stories. A crimson mask found on body is a message from the killer to Poe and the police about where he will strike next. The killer is playing a game with them and when the life of his beloved Emily is threatened Poe is forced to play the killer's game.
Raven takes a while to get going and one of my objections is the usage of profaine and raunchy language, particularly in the early scenes in what appears to be an attempt to modernize or update the story to contemporary language to give it an edgy feel. It doesn't work and is distracting. (Speaking of distracting, who was the genius who came up with the closing credits. They were totally out of sync with the rest of the film. It was like splicing the credits for Pulp Fiction onto the end of Passion of the Christ, very distracting and annoying.) The film might be minimally entertaining if you are not familiar with Poe's writing, the acting is serviceable but the characters don't really get much chance for development. Cusack's performance, I would assume, bore very little resemblance to the real Edgar Allen Poe is over the top and similar to Robert Downey Juniors's take on Sherlock Holmes. The film a whole had the taste of a mystery thriller romp with a pulpy comic book feel. It tries too hard to be compete with the more sensational, grisly films of this genre yet still maintain an air of superiority by not actually getting all the way into the gutter but just tiptoeing though it. It can't seem to decide if it is an edgy historical thriller or a comic book superhero adventure. In the end it doesn't really work very well.
| Cast: | |||
 | John Cusack | ... | |
 | Luke Evans | ... | |
 | Alice Eve | ... | |
 | Brendan Gleeson | ... | |
 | Kevin McNally | ... | Maddux |
 | Oliver Jackson-Cohen | ... | John Cantrell |
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