The Raven Review

[Westside Steve]

The Raven

Relativity Media

R 111 min

Well gang, one nice thing about a movie based at least in part on history (Well unless it's Quentin Tarantino) is that I don't worry too much about the spoiler.

THE RAVEN (not to be confused with those awful Vincent Price flicks) is based loosely, and I mean very loosely, around the life and times of the famous American horror author Edgar Allan Poe.

We are all fairly familiar with Poe, his poverty, his alcoholism, his depression and his untimely death. What is less clear is the fact that he was also a Sherlock Holmes caliber detective and actually solved a case centered on a lunatic serial killer. Between you and me, I'm guessing that part is speculation.

This film begins with Poe dying on a Baltimore park bench and the story is told in flashback.

: It seems that Poe's formerly tragic love life has taken a turn for the better. He's engaged to be married to a lovely young woman Emily (Alice Eve), and despite the disapproval of her tycoon father, things are looking up. Unfortunately all this good fortune comes to a halt when a string of grisly murders based on Poe’s stories appear.

After ruling the writer out as a suspect the police

grudgingly enlist his assistance. That makes sense, right? Now it’s out of the frying pan and into the fire as Emily is abducted by the killer and a ransom demand presented.

The maniac vows to kill more people and leave a clue upon each corpse as to where the girlfriend is buried and presumably clinging to life. Not only must be Poe and the police figure out where she is but the killer also demands the story be written in serial form and printed in the daily paper.

It's really a pretty good idea for a plot, unfortunately the execution never quite lives up to the potential. I'm thinking a few basic rewrites might have made the clues seem a bit cleverer. You’ll probably figure out the general motivation do for very long.

On top of it all I wake John Cusack pretty well in most everything he's done but here I had a hard time accepting him as the darkly morose Poe. I realize why it had to be done in the context of the romance but still...

To sum it this is another example of a good idea that falls a little short of being a great idea.

C+

WSS