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A Review of The Raven

This Movie is partly inspired by the controversy surrounding the final days of Edgar Alan Poe. If his reputation as a drunk and a drug user is accurate, he probably just wore himself out, but various biographers have delighted in cloaking the writer’s death in mystery. In the movie’s version, Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack) is a celebrated writer tottering on the brink of life, earning a meagre living in Baltimore from brutally criticising the work of other writers for a newspaper. A detective (Luke Evans) approaches Poe for a chat about a couple of recent murders. It seems they bear a strong resemblance to some of Poe’s writings. Understandably upset by the police department’s suspicion that he could be involved in the murders, Poe decides to help the police with their investigation. When his fiancee, Emily (Alice Eve) is kidnapped by the murderer, Poe must find Emily before it is too late.

Unfortunately, the glaring errors in this movie make it difficult to watch. Movies are supposed to make you forget your life and your surroundings. Good ones can do that. Some movies have elements that stop you from losing yourself in the story. Ingrid Bergman’s Swedish-cockney accent in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Marlon Brando’s clowning around in The Missouri Breaks; Robert Downey Jr’s twenty-first century American vernacular in his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes are glaring examples.

The writers responsible for the script of The Raven have made a few attempts at making the dialog match the wardrobe, but mostly their charaters talk the way they themselves probably do. Movie producers pay people to painstakingly research clothing, lighting, architecture but the writers appear unable to do a little research into the way people spoke in 1850s Baltimore.

Another major distraction is the sudden transformation of the Poe character. A self absorbed alcoholic is quite capable of great writing, but it is too much to accept that Poe can instantaneously acquire the mental and physical capacities to match wits with a criminal mastermind. There are other things about this movie that are troubling. The CGI blood looks CGI-ish, the supporting characters are underdeveloped to the point of invisibility, and the continuity is not continuous. On top of that, the film is far too reminiscent of the recent Sherlock Holmes movies and From Hell, a Johnny Depp movie from 2001.

A film showing Edgar Alan Poe solving crimes should not have been this unmemorable. There are so many possibilities: the drunken author fighting his demons to resuscitate his once fine reasoning abilities; the writer and the detective forming an uneasy alliance to foil the evil genius.

John Cusack and Alice Eve are hard-working actors, but Cusack could have benefitted by ignoring this project and Eve’s character could have been left out altogether. Like the circumstances of Edgar Allan Poe’s death, the motives of these actors is shroudd in mystery. Maybe one day someone will write a period movie where two characters named John Cusack and Alice Eve are coerced by supernatural forces into appearing in a dumb movie in order to save the lives of a basket of kittens.

On the face of it, this could be a perfectly respectable potboiler of a movie for an undemanding audience. Unfortunately some of the flaws are too big to go unnoticed, even by the least critical moviegoer.



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A Review of The Raven

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