The Raven: A Multitude of Misfires

The Raven feels like it would’ve been right at home had it come out in theaters back in the early 2000s, perhaps as a daily double feature with Kiss The Girls or Along Came A Spider. All those movies share a similar structure of brilliant investigators tracking an even-more-brilliant killer (until the last act, of course) with the ticking clock of a kidnapped victim at stake. The twist this time around is that the brilliant investigator happens to be famous poet Edgar Allen Poe.

Unfortunately, that moderately interesting, historically inventive conceit (though, it’s no Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) isn’t nearly enough to survive the shoddy filmmaking which brings it to life. John Cusack plays Poe, who at the point we meet him is broke, belligerent, and begging for work at the Baltimore newspaper. Instead of portraying him as a pitiable character, screenwriters Hannah Shakespeare and Ben Livingston cast him as wholly unlikeable. In the opening scene, Poe barges into a local pub demanding free drinks simply because he wrote popular poems (that only one person in the establishment has even heard of), going so far as stealing and drinking another man’s full beer and proceeding to insult him. The only thing going for him is that, one, he’s John Cusack and he’s impossible to not like in anything he does, and two, for whatever reason he has the love of Emily Hamilton, played by Alice Eve. Score one for the nerdy writers.

But therein lies one of the major problems with the film: Poe and Emily’s relationship lacks any chemistry whatsoever. This poses quite the dramatic issue when the entire crux of the plot surrounds Emily being kidnapped by a serial killer who stages his murders from Poe’s dark stories, forcing Poe to assist Investigator Fields (Luke Evans, channeling his inner Michael Shannon) in finding the culprit before she dies. Apparently it’s supposed to add gravitas to the situation because Poe’s tragic history involves his first wife death sending him into the depths of alcoholism and depression, so clearly for him to lose another love would be too much for him to handle. Yet, the filmmakers spent more time on his belligerence and rivalry with Emily’s father (Brendan Glesson), who didn’t think Poe was good enough for his daughter — and, honestly, it’s hard to not see why. The Raven wants to portray Poe as this brooding, dark, haunted individual, but all the fog machines in the world (and trust me, they were all employed during production) can’t create the emotional depth that more deeply constructed characters could have. And it’s such a missed opportunity because Poe’s life is so rich for this fictionalized account. Regardless, all of this likely could’ve been overlooked had there been any sense of love between Eve and Cusack. Based on how it’s portrayed, I wouldn’t be surprised if neither of them spoke once outside of the lines they were required to say to each other on screen.

And while there are certainly issues with the script that causes this disconnect (along with mis-titling it The Raven when the framing story draws much more from “The Tell-Tale Heart” than anything else), much of the blame also has to rest with Cusack. Look, I love The Cuse as much as the next. But he’s best when playing the loveable loser from High Fidelity or the romantic sap in Serendipity. As talented as he is, he’s just never convincing as the macabre Edgar Allan Poe, no matter how much black hair dye goes into his finely man-scaped goatee.

Honestly, there’s plenty of blame to go around. The Raven seems to be one of those total misfires where everyone’s off their game. Director James McTeigue is no Scorsese, but his V For Vendetta was competent enough, so it seemed like he should be able to handle this. Instead, many of the important scenes were so poorly staged that it was impossible to follow what was going on because the vital plot points were literally not captured on film. The first act turn in The Raven takes place at this costume ball that Emily’s father throws (apparently it’s an annual Baltimore event that even when a serial killer threatens to crash the party it’s not worth rescheduling or even allowing extra police officers to guard). Tension escalates as Poe and Emily dance in the middle of the ballroom when a creepy horseman rides straight into the party causing a total melee – a ripe moment for a kidnapping, right? But, as it plays out, we see Poe embracing Emily to protect her, then the next moment we cut to the horseman producing a note saying that the killer has Emily. What!? We literally just saw her and Poe hugging, yet somehow in that fraction of a second Poe not only lets her go, but she’s already long gone. Based on the size of the room alone, the killer and Emily couldn’t have even made it yet to the door much less so far away as to not even elicit a chase from the surrounding police officers.

There’s a potential movie buried in The Raven. The world is interesting, as could be the main character if given a more interesting direction. And as the story progressed, I did find myself at least moderately entertained by the whole cat-and-mouse play between the taunting serial killer and the always-two-steps-behind Poe and, even if the whole thing was just a Scooby-Doo episode: there was no way to piece together the identity of the killer on our own, leaving the big unmasking at the end to inevitably come out of nowhere with a resounding yawn of “Who cares?” instead of the likely desired response of “It was him!?”  Unfortunately, The Raven’s various ideas never coalesce into anything remotely close to the caliber of stories the real Poe wrote in a genre he helped invent.