But this many-feathered animal (rated R; opens Friday nationwide; **½ out of four) occasionally soars before it crash-lands. A serial killer/Gothic drama/love story hybrid, it has some nicely mounted atmospheric scenes and strong acting from John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe. But it is dogged by a story that grows plodding.
This is not the film adaptation of Poe's famous poem, but it does pay tribute to the writer's prose and poetry. The film centers on stories he serialized in newspapers, and is a yarn featuring the literary artist interlaced with his macabre work and a crime-thriller plot.
A serial killer is loose in Baltimore in 1849, and the murders contain gruesome elements of the fiction of Poe, whose work appears in the local newspaper. After being cleared as a suspect, Poe assists a police detective (Luke Evans) and gets drawn deeper into the slayings when his fiancée, Emily (Alice Eve), is kidnapped. Echoes of The Pit and the Pendulum, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and lesser-known works are featured in the tale.
Seemingly meant to elucidate Poe's character and psyche, the film does not achieve those goals. We see he's tortured and drinks excessively, but are not given enough back story about how he got there. Nor does it shed light on the real-life mystery of his death. The i mplication is that Poe spent his final days working out the mystery of these slayings. His last words revealed the killer's identity. It's fascinating, if implausible.
About the movie
The Raven
**1/2 out of four
Stars: John Cusack, Alice Eve, Brendan Gleeson, Luke Evans
Director: James McTeigue
Distributor: Relativity Media
Rating: R for bloody violence and grisly images
Running time: 1 hour and 43 minutes
Opens Friday nationwide
Still, it's a moderately entertaining yarn that conjures up the era effectively through vivid period costumes and, mostly, Cusack's able rendering of the mercurial writer, a social pariah in his day.
Cusack's and Poe's considerable talents, however, are given short shrift by a prosaic screenplay that flattens the considerable intrigue out of the character's life, minimizes his verbal dexterity and has the characters occasionally speaking dialogue that sounds anachronistic to the era.
At its core, it's a standard-issue police procedural/whodunit, even if set in a more romantic era. The biographical elements are obscured by the grisly details of the murders. And most of the cast â€" which includes some impressive British actors â€" come off as stock characters.
While much of the story feels hollow and the suspense loses momentum, The Ra ven is worth seeing if only for Cusack's boozy turn as the odd bird writer.
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