An hour in a theater dreary, John Cusack's acting's made me weary.
Lets say his wooden Poe performance had me yearning for the door.
While I nodded, nearly napping (still works!), I stopped to think about the slapping,
Writer? Director? Actor? Slapping, wondering who deserved it more.
"'Tis a felony," I muttered, "slapping Cusack to the floor."
"Shouldn’t have expected more…"
Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack) is yanked from his life as one of history’s greatest artists — and most underappreciated in his or her own time — by Inspector Fields (Luke Evans) for questioning in a double murder that mirrors the killings in his story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The killer’s next slaying is modeled — quite vividly — after “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and Poe is taken on as a consultant in the case of Baltimore’s newest serial killer. Poe and Fields are put to the test as the killer abducts Poe’s fiancée (Alice Eve as Emily Hamilton) and taunts the two with clues at further murders, daring them to test their wits in order to save the girl and catch the killer.
Sigh.
If the Academy Awards had a category for movie ideas, The Raven would certainly be the early favorite for Best Concept & Premise. A movie that puts the father of the detective story in the role of detective in order to save his beloved from a deranged killer whose murders are pulled straight from Poe’s own prose? This was a premise to excite fans of any depth, from “Yeah, I think I read Poe once in middle school” to “I have ‘Nevermore’ tattooed somewhere special.” I had a literary Poe-ner just thinking about it.
Execution thereof? Not so much.
Imagine my lack of surprise to find that Hollywood would let me down and cast the lamplight o’er a steaming pile of crap.
Acting? Brendan Gleeson is well cast as Captain Hamilton, disapproving father to Poe’s love. Eve is equally palatable as Emily, object of desire. Evans is particularly effective as the indefatigable Inspector Fields. So where did it all go wrong?
There are two directions in which to assign blame: does one blame Cusack for particularly bland delivery, or fledgling writers Hannah Shakespeare (various TV series and movies) and Ben Livingston (The Raven, and, um … ???) and director James McTeigue (V for Vendetta… REALLY?!)? For the entire first half of this great-idea-made-bad-movie, Cusack is as stiff as one of the film’s many corpses, but a closer look at that with which he was forced to work makes me think he might be as tortured by bad writing as Poe was by his malignant melancholy.
And, please, tell me Poe’s pet raccoon, Carl, was not an idea spawned from the theory that he died of rabies? (A Cusack interview confirms it, making it [http://web.orange.co.uk/article/film/the-raven-john-cusack-interview-1491151], the most infuriating inside joke in cinematic history.
If you’ve seen Se7en, Misery and Basic Instinct, do yourself a favor and have a rent-a-thon over the weekend instead of enduring this disservice to one of America’s most enigmatic fiction writers. Poe’s ghost will thank you.
This article appears in Apr 26 – May 2, 2012.