The Raven (2012)

Director: James McTeigue                              Writers: Ben Livingston & Hannah Shakespeare
Film Score: Lucas Vidal                                  Cinematography: Danny Ruhlmann
Starring: John Cusack, Luke Evans, Alice Eve and Brendan Gleeson

Ever since the success of Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes films, filmmakers have been attempting to create their own spin on Victorian era detection in the hopes of emulating that success. In Britain, their new Sherlock Holmes television series Sherlock is set in the present day so they came up with Ripper Street, centered on the time and the place of the Jack the Ripper killings. That series stars the great Matthew McFadden as a police detective solving rather intricately planned murders. The Raven is an attempt to do the same thing in America, with Edgar Alan Poe as the detective. Unfortunately the filmmakers chose as their star John Cusack, who not only pales in comparison to Robert Downey Jr., but pales in comparison to Edgar Alan Poe. The film tries for the same type of humor and action, and isn’t bad in the later. The screenplay by TV writer Hannah Shakespeare is definitely helped by Hollywood veteran Ben Livingston and had some real potential, but the acting is really bad, so bad in fact that despite the writing the end result is a tired, clichéd film that goes nowhere and is incredibly disappointing.

The film begins with a shot of John Cusack as Edgar Allan Poe sitting in the park. He leans his head back, shot from above, while a raven flies beneath the daytime moon. As the sky turns dark, a scream is heard and police race through the streets to an apartment building where two women are strangled and the killer has escaped the locked room. The scene then shifts to a bar where Cusack attempts to get a drink on the promise of a review of his to be published, but instead he winds up being forcibly ejected from the premises. When Baltimore homicide detective Luke Evans looks at the crime scene and realizes it’s exactly like the story “Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Poe, he calls Cusack in for questioning. It’s only when a second murder, of a critic of Poe no less, done in the style of “The Pit and the Pendulum” happens that Evans looks to Cusack for help rather than as a suspect. Meanwhile, Cusack has fallen in love with a young woman, Alice Eve, whose father, Brendan Gleeson, hates him. She wants him to announce their engagement at the costume ball her father is throwing for Baltimore society, but when the killer leaves a clue that the next murder will be done in the style of “The Masque of the Red Death” he thinks it may not be the right time. Evans fills the party with his men, but when a horse and rider enter the ballroom, Eve is kidnapped in the confusion and Cusack is forced to write more stories to keep her alive.

The screenplay probably looked very good. While not an original idea--a murderer being inspired by the macabre tales of a horror writer--the addition of Edgar Allan Poe as the writer and the nineteenth-century setting must have seemed like a great way to capitalize on the popularity of films like Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. And it should have worked. The major problem is with the acting, and it absolutely sinks the film. John Cusack is horribly miscast as the haunted writer. Most of the time he simply looks bored, which is how he plays in most of his films. Add to that the unbelievably bad acting of Alice Eve, a minor actor with an unimpressive resume of films, and the wooden stiffness of Luke Evans and there is no way for the film to recover. In their hands the lines become hollow and unbelievable and their actions perfunctory. The production design, by Roger Ford is by far the best thing the film has going for it. The settings are all equally impressive and while a similar blue tint as is used in the Sherlock Holmes films is used on the negative in places, the sepia tone of most of the interior scenes is a vast improvement over that film. Director James McTeigue, who helmed the first Matrix film, does what he can with what he’s given, but despite some terrific setups--the shot with Eve buried alive, for instance--the bad acting foils him at every turn. Being a huge fan of Poe, I wanted to like The Raven a lot, and had the production been able to afford a better cast I might have. As it stands, however, it is another example of a promising screenplay gone horribly wrong.