Brad's Take: The Raven - *

The basic idea of The Raven is, though a little ridiculous, a pretty good idea for a fun piece of pulp: A serial killer bases his murders on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, leading the police to ask for his help in tracking this killer down. When Poe agrees, the killer kidnaps his fiancé and challenges him to write stories based on his future murders in exchange for clues as to his fiancé's whereabouts. So Poe becomes detective trying to solve the mystery of his own work. Sounds interesting, no? Art imitating life... turning life into art... about art based on life imitating art... or something like that. Well, it's not interesting. Not in the slightest.

I'm not sure if it's ironic or just lazy that a murder mystery about Edgar Allan Poe could be so lacking in thrills. How is that possible? Well, it doesn't help that Poe is written about as blandly as can be, without any real hint of what made the man a literary genius. His poetic, mid-19th century style of speech is turned on and off as if by switch depending on the importance of the scene's expository dialogue, and alcoholism is treated like a boy scout merit badge he is trying to earn, rather than a debilitating condition that might actually turn him into an interesting protagonist. So we see him getting into barroom tussles and calling everybody "philistine" which, had I not been told about two hundred and seventy four times that this guy wrote "The Raven" (the poem, not this movie), is pretty close to how I would describe this character.

The Raven was directed by James McTeague, who previously directed the fantastic V For Vendetta and the hyper-kinetic Ninja Assassin, which makes me wonder how this film could be so drab. It's visually dull, poorly paced, and has no idea what tone to adopt, being at times almost tongue-in-cheek ridiculous while at others so self-serious it was almost parody. Even worse, it fails to create any kind of tension or atmosphere... you might think that it would have a sense of macabre, but instead everything is brightly lit, even the underground coffin in which his fiancé is being kept. The characters are constantly carrying around lanterns which, given the abundant sources of light in every scene, I have to assume were some leftover props from another film. 

The real mystery of The Raven is why this story had to be told using Poe as its main character. There seems to be no reason beyond using a recognizable figure to grant legitimacy to such an insipid screenplay. Beyond a few references to some of his works in the form of murders with cartoonish splatters of blood shooting at the screen (which made me seriously wonder if the guy in the ticket booth forgot to give me my 3-D glasses) and the aforementioned two hundred and seventy four allusions to "The Raven," there is almost nothing onscreen resembling the life or works of Edgar Allan Poe, missing above all the imagination it takes to create a compelling murder mystery.