Bird-brained take on Poe's work
By David Germain |
May 11, 2012, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
WHAT would Edgar Allan Poe be doing if he were alive today? Clawing at the inside of his coffin, desperate to get at the people who used and abused his ingenious, diabolical tales as the basis for the pile of cinematic bird poo that is "The Raven."
Poe was a dissolute American author of dark short stories and poems who died in 1849 as a drunken wreck of a man but whose work has remained popular.
Like carrion feeders, the filmmakers peck and gnash at Poe's stories to fill out a plot that sounds sort of cool in concept - a serial killer using the author's fiction as a blueprint for ghastly murders - but is feather-headed in execution.
John Cusack makes a terrible Poe, the somber role as one of literature's great tortured souls spotlighting his limitations as an actor. With his little goatee and black cape, Cusack vaguely looks the part, but he is a lightweight - voice too whiny, mannerisms too exaggerated, cadence too reedy to bring alive the movie's frequent passages of Poe's lyrical writing.
Other than some stylishly Gothic visuals crafted by director James McTeigue ("V for Vendetta"), "The Raven" is an unimaginative mess whose superficial appropriations of Poe's devilish yarns are deeply unworthy of the author.
An introductory sequence establishes Cusack's Poe as a garden-variety drunk, scruffy, squabbling, egomaniacal and perpetually penniless. Yet his popular stories of the macabre and his darkly romantic poetry keep him in favor with the ladies of Baltimore society. Particularly, with beautiful heiress Emily Hamilton (Alice Eve), whom Poe hopes to marry.
Screenwriters Hannah Shakespeare and Ben Livingston then pull a "Saw" on Poe, taking that torture-porn franchise's idea of gamesmanship by a serial killer and imposing it on poor Edgar.
Police detective Emmett Fields (Luke Evans) enlists Poe to consult on a double homicide after recognizing it as a copycat of the author's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Soon they are faced with a pile of corpses dispatched in methods borrowed from other Poe stories, the taunting killer forcing the author to play along to end the slaying spree.
"The Raven" reinforces how fiendishly clever Poe was. The premises of his stories still resonate as a source of Americans' modern collective nightmares - and as an endless source for Hollywood to plagiarize. Yet Poe's stories also highlight how lame a reimagining McTeigue and his collaborators have come up with. Rather than taking Poe's ideas and running wild, the filmmakers wring nothing more than a few moments of gore from them.
Indeed, "The Raven" offers up one of the dullest mass murderers ever. Quoth the raven, "Go see something else."
Poe was a dissolute American author of dark short stories and poems who died in 1849 as a drunken wreck of a man but whose work has remained popular.
Like carrion feeders, the filmmakers peck and gnash at Poe's stories to fill out a plot that sounds sort of cool in concept - a serial killer using the author's fiction as a blueprint for ghastly murders - but is feather-headed in execution.
John Cusack makes a terrible Poe, the somber role as one of literature's great tortured souls spotlighting his limitations as an actor. With his little goatee and black cape, Cusack vaguely looks the part, but he is a lightweight - voice too whiny, mannerisms too exaggerated, cadence too reedy to bring alive the movie's frequent passages of Poe's lyrical writing.
Other than some stylishly Gothic visuals crafted by director James McTeigue ("V for Vendetta"), "The Raven" is an unimaginative mess whose superficial appropriations of Poe's devilish yarns are deeply unworthy of the author.
An introductory sequence establishes Cusack's Poe as a garden-variety drunk, scruffy, squabbling, egomaniacal and perpetually penniless. Yet his popular stories of the macabre and his darkly romantic poetry keep him in favor with the ladies of Baltimore society. Particularly, with beautiful heiress Emily Hamilton (Alice Eve), whom Poe hopes to marry.
Screenwriters Hannah Shakespeare and Ben Livingston then pull a "Saw" on Poe, taking that torture-porn franchise's idea of gamesmanship by a serial killer and imposing it on poor Edgar.
Police detective Emmett Fields (Luke Evans) enlists Poe to consult on a double homicide after recognizing it as a copycat of the author's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Soon they are faced with a pile of corpses dispatched in methods borrowed from other Poe stories, the taunting killer forcing the author to play along to end the slaying spree.
"The Raven" reinforces how fiendishly clever Poe was. The premises of his stories still resonate as a source of Americans' modern collective nightmares - and as an endless source for Hollywood to plagiarize. Yet Poe's stories also highlight how lame a reimagining McTeigue and his collaborators have come up with. Rather than taking Poe's ideas and running wild, the filmmakers wring nothing more than a few moments of gore from them.
Indeed, "The Raven" offers up one of the dullest mass murderers ever. Quoth the raven, "Go see something else."
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