The Raven (2012)
Directed by James McTeigue
A fictionalized account of the last days of Edgar Allan Poe's life, in which the poet is in pursuit of a serial killer whose murders mirror those in the writer's stories.
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24 films that influenced The Raven
What critics say influenced The Raven
A darkly sumptuous, exceedingly enticing murder mystery, the film, directed by James McTeigue (2005's " V for Vendetta "), reminds of 2001's Jack the Ripper saga " From Hell ," or, what Guy Ritchie's overly silly, dull and inconsequential " Sherlock Holmes " movies should have been from the start.
The ambitious script, by Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare (really!), is part "Seven", part " From Hell ", and part " Sherlock Holmes ", but despite its been-there killed-that derivations, there are enough clever nods to Poe's writing, enough literary inside-winks, and enough fun had with his final days, that it should appease its viewers (though, I'm not sure who its target audience might be).
Overall, “The Raven” has a similar feel to director James McTeigue’s previous “V For Vendetta” as well as the Johnny Depp Jack the Ripper thriller “From Hell.”
Imagine a world where the Johnny Depp-starring adaptation of Alan Moore’s “From Hell” was such a smash it spawned imitators hoping to cash in on its success.
What passes for detective work in this leaden whodunit falls light years short of " From Hell " or " Sleepy Hollow ," where the investigator digs deep enough into the case to find a familiar face gazing back at him, a killer who's the hero's psychic doppelganger.
It’s From Hell with less style and less personality.
Cusack tries to make Poe into some kind of off-kilter charmer, a word-spewing prototype for Hunter S. Thompson one moment, the original emo-moper the next, and beneath all that is a gleeful naiveté reminiscent of Johnny Depp's performance in Sleepy Hollow.
Taking the collected works of America’s original master of horror and drawing on their most gruesome murders as the inspiration for something resembling the love child of Saw and Sleepy Hollow might have seemed like a good idea to director James McTeigue.
What passes for detective work in this leaden whodunit falls light years short of " From Hell " or " Sleepy Hollow ," where the investigator digs deep enough into the case to find a familiar face gazing back at him, a killer who's the hero's psychic doppelganger.
I also quite like the films From Hell and Sleepy Hollow, and The Raven feels like it was sort of cut from similar cloth.
This seems like a familiar movie gambit (shades of Stephen King’s “Misery”), but it’s a conceptual idea with some depth.
Director James McTeigue ("V for Vendetta") has created a nicely crafted film with loads of atmosphere and grisly crime scenes, but screenwriters Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare ("Loverboy") fail utterly with this insipid twist on Stephen King's "Misery."
Poe and Fields must ponder clues planted on yet more corpses in order to deduce where Emily has been hidden; in a "Misery"-style twist, the psychotic fan insists that Poe write up his detective work as an ongoing narrative, to be printed each day in the local paper run by editor Henry Maddox ("Pirates of the Caribbean" regular Kevin McNally, forever playing men with muttonchops).
The conclusion conjures up a race against time to save Emily, liberally borrowing elements from George Sluizer’s 1988 shocker “The Vanishing” to bring Poe to a place of disorientation that shadowed his actual death on Baltimore streets in 1849.
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Following in the footsteps of offerings such as "Basic Instinct" and the TV show "Castle," our surly author (John Cusack, seemingly channeling Nic Cage at first) discovers that someone out there is playing copycat to murders and other elements of his popular works beginning with the double homicide in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" through the grisly means of death in "The Pit and the Pendulum" and more.
The chief influence clearly comes from Douglas Hickox's classic thriller Theatre of Blood (1973), in which the cinema's supreme exponent of Poe, Vincent Price, plays a sadistic old actor exacting revenge on the London theatre critics' circle by dispatching them one by one in gory death scenes from Shakespeare.
Or if you must, at least have as much fun with it as Theatre of Blood did.
We had murders based on Shakespeare plays in the great British horror Theatre of Blood .
The verse and short stories of “the divine Edgar” — as Humbert Humbert calls him in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita — have inspired more movies than the works of any writer but Shakespeare.
(The movie owes a secret debt to 1979's underrated "Time After Time," in which H.G. Wells tracks Jack the Ripper.)
Still, if the movies can give us H.G. Wells as a real time traveller (“Time After Time”) and Abraham Lincoln as a vampire slayer (“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter”), why not a Poe who is a lover, a virile man of action, an amateur sleuth who sacrifices all for art and love?
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Many expectant moviegoers had been describing McTeigue’s Poe film as Se7en in 19th Century Baltimore but, sadly, The Raven lacks nearly all the aspects that made David Fincher’s serial killer film so captivating – i.e. jaw-dropping reveals, smart twists, and – despite loads of Poe stories to pull from – intriguing murder scenes are all in short supply.
As noir stylings go, The Raven aims for the realm of David Fincher’s Se7en and ends up at about a two.
That it also feels like yet another Se7en knockoff makes the paradox complete.
It's a mishmash of Se7en-style serial killings – based on Poe's own stories – and a ponderous, wandering storyline that attempts to cram as much of the writer's known escapades into a shopworn framework of historical fiction.
This can work nicely, as in "Se7en," but in "The Raven," it is all concoction, a device to link Edgar Allan Poe with modern serial-killer formulas and shovel in a great deal of special-effects violence.
I must confess I’m confused about exactly why “The Raven’’ ends with hardrocking “Se7en’’style credits.
A darkly sumptuous, exceedingly enticing murder mystery, the film, directed by James McTeigue (2005's " V for Vendetta "), reminds of 2001's Jack the Ripper saga " From Hell ," or, what Guy Ritchie's overly silly, dull and inconsequential " Sherlock Holmes " movies should have been from the start.
McTeigue (who directed, seemingly a century ago, the adaptation of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta) is working from a script by Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare, and you can see he’s pedaling hard to keep the suspense level high: The Raven seems to be striving to jazz up Poe the way Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movies tried – unsuccessfully – to capture the spark of Arthur Conan Doyle.
This may conjure up unpleasant memories of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movies, but Ritchie could learn a lot from director James McTeigue (V for Vendetta); this is multiplex fare to be sure, but McTeigue manages to popularize 19th-century literature without completely vulgarizing it.
But on the screen, it’s more a companion to 2009’s Sherlock Holmes —a similarly over-the-top, visually busy adventure thriller about a Victorian literary hero plagued by a criminal mastermind.