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Capone quoths THE RAVEN: EverBored!!!

Published at: April 27, 2012, 2:07 a.m. CST

Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here.

In concept, I've got nothing against the idea of a film that turns the great and gloomy author/poet Edgar Allan Poe into a crime-fighting tool working with the Baltimore police to solve a series of murders that seem to be inspired by his own grizzly writings. I especially like the idea in the hands of director James McTeigue, whose V FOR VENDETTA adaptation was a great period piece that mixed fact and fiction, and resulted in a rousing call to arms against inequality. So why in God's name was I so astonishingly bored by THE RAVEN?

Perhaps it was John Cusack's underwhelming portrayal of Poe, a drunken lout pining for a woman far above his class (Alice Eve). Or perhaps it was the cardboard cutout portrait of the police detective (Luke Evans) leading the investigations into the murder. And while I'm perfectly aware that THE RAVEN isn't meant to be a straight-forward biopic, finally getting the writer on the screen should have inspired the filmmakers to give us a little taste of his real life rather than just this manufactured stuff.

Perhaps the worse miscalculation is that we really want a "Poe in Love" story; not that I don't find Alice Eve fetching and all, but I'd like to see a little bit inside the soul of the man who could come up with such grotesque and gothic material. I get that Poe was prone to getting lovesick (as well as just sick sick), but that doesn't make for particularly compelling storytelling.

The mystery surrounding the identity of the killer is especially uninspired, and since there are so few characters in THE RAVEN, the identity of the serial killer isn't that tough to figure out. His motives are the only mystery, and even they are rather lackluster. The great Brendan Gleeson is grossly underutilized as Eve's protective father who refuses to let Poe near his princess. But what truly rubbed me the wrong way was what I think will be looked back on as one of the greatest mis-castings in recent film history. Cusack looks like he'd rather be anywhere but in this movie, and after a while I just got sick of looking at his face. I think he's a great actor; please don't think otherwise. But this movie and he simply don't fit.

I guess the look of the film is something I could recommend, although so much of it is shown as murky and fog-covered, it became difficult to admire the lovely sets and locations. What feels missing from THE RAVEN is inspiration. Poe isn't especially heartbroken since Eve's character seems very much in love with him, so that source of gloom and doom is missing. As the film opens, Poe appears to be slowly dying, so that little source of intrigue is killed. In short, I spent most of this film searching for a source of real drama and coming up short. This isn't a film trying hard enough for me to truly hate, but the substantial lack of enthusiasm for the material got me really annoyed.

-- Steve Prokopy
"Capone"
capone@aintitcool.com
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