THE RAVEN (2012): Quoth the raven, "Eat my shorts."

In a world where Abraham Lincoln fights vampires and Sherlock Holmes is a mixed martial artist, I suppose casting Edgar Allan Poe as an amateur homicide detective isn't such an egregious rewriting of history.  At least Poe no doubt had the fascination with the macabre to give him a familiar insight into the mind of a killer.  And his stories, helpfully in the public domain, make cheap fodder for Hollywood thrills.

John Cusack might seem like an odd choice to play Poe, but I actually can't think of anyone more perfect.  Who better to capture Poe's romantic frustration, his themes of outright abandonment by the opposite sex?  I'd like to see Cusack play Poe in an actual biopic.

That's not what The Raven is, nor is it a feature-length version of the classic poem.  Nor, in fact, is it expanded to a silly celebration of all of the things that Poe held dear, like Roger Corman's 1963 film of the same name.  In fact, aside from one or two quotes and a couple of wing-flappings, the movie has little to do with its namesake.  Cusack is Poe, broke and long suffering from writer's block.  People in his home town of Baltimore are being murdered in the style of Poe's stories, and the killer contacts him with clues.  The police, led by Detective Fields (Luke Evans), team up with him to solve the case.

The procedural plot of the film is as contrived as they come.  The murders are graphic and not very inventive; they even bear little resemblance to Poe's work.  Given Roger Ebert's Law of Economy of Characters, we know that the unidentified killer must be one of the characters we have met, unless the movie, like Se7en, has something else in mind.  This movie does not, and the surprise reveal comes with little fanfare.  The killer's motive is bland, and the confrontation between him and Poe is a yawn.

The one thing that anchors it is Cusack's performance, which is inspired.  If the script doesn't quite allow him to really get under Poe's skin, he at least gives us a genuine hero: a man who has loved and lost one too many times, and is fighting for his own last grasp on humanity, especially when his own girlfriend (Alice Eve) gets caught up in the mix.

Director James McTeigue, who made the very good V for Vendetta, manages to salvage a couple of good suspense sequences.  The first is borrowed from "The Premature Burial," in which a character awakens inside a coffin somewhere--McTeigue doesn't show us any outside point of view--and must find a way out.  The other comes toward the end, in which a character has been poisoned and must use what little life he has left to save someone else.  It's in these scenes that the real Poe seems to make a cameo appearance.

** out of ****

NOTE: One of the movie's screenwriters is named Hannah Shakespeare, which has given me an idea for the next movie of this type: William Shakespeare, Zombie Killer.