Review
THE RAVEN: Watch It At Home – Not Much Tell-Tale Heart (Or Brain)
Sometimes less-than-great minds think alike, too. The idea of Edgar Allen Poe as a detective investigating strange phenomena was at the center of ABC’s busted pilot Poe last year (see our pilot report here), but it seems the failure of that project didn’t discourage the new film THE RAVEN. In its second incarnation, the concept continues to seem a lot less clever than the filmmakers seem to think it is.
This time, Poe (John Cusack) is introduced in the Baltimore of 1849, near the end of his life. He’s hopelessly dissipated, a drunk and opium user, dead broke and despite some fame, desperately scrambling for commissions from the local newspaper. Despite all this, he’s won the heart of the richest, loveliest girl in town, Emily (Alice Eve), daughter of the disapproving Captain Hamilton (Brendan Gleeson). The two have decided to marry, but before they can announce the engagement, Poe finds himself embroiled in the hunt for a serial killer whose crimes duplicate the murders in Poe’s own work (a grisly pit and pendulum, someone walled up a la “The Cask of Amontillado,” etc). After briefly considering Poe as a suspect, Inspector Fields (Luke Evans) pulls Poe in as an advisor and unofficial detective on the case–he’s basically Castle with substance dependency. Of course it’s only a matter of time until the beauteous Emily is in the clutches of the mysterious killer, and then the race is on to track her down before the worst can happen.


The Raven is certainly of a higher class than the slasher and found-footage thrillers we mostly get these days, for what that’s worth, and it’s watchable, in a low-level way. But while the ABC Poe pilot at least had a semi-original notion (borrowed from the recent Sherlock Holmes movies) of Poe as a proto-, pre-X Files Mulder, The Raven is little more than a violent Cliff’s Notes of Poe’s own murder scenes. Everything about it is purloined.