Movie review: 'The Raven' with John Cusack - New York Daily News

John Cusack portrays Edgar Allan Poe and has a killer time trying to track down a murderer in 'The Raven'

What a ridiculous proposition “The Raven” is. Cloaked in shadows and fog and scratching furiously at the corners of every murder mystery ever to darken a doily on PBS, this wannabe Sherlockian thriller is like a night spent at Madame Tussauds, watching mannequins strangle other mannequins.

John Cusack plays writer and poet Edgar Allan Poe, whose last week in 1849 Baltimore, as imagined by screenwriters Ben Livingston and Hannah Shakespeare, is spent in pursuit of a killer taking images from Poe’s famously macabre stories and making them real. (The most grisly involves a poor soul who has to live out “The Pit and the Pendulum.”)

Poe, a perpetually penniless, often drunk blowhard who here stalks the cobblestone streets in a cape and who goes home to dissect organs in front of his pet raccoon, soon realizes the murders are â€" horrors! â€" inspired by scenes in his own stories.

When his fiancée (an underutilized Alice Eve) is kidnapped and buried alive in a coffin under the floorboard â€" a la “The Tell-Tale Heart” â€" Poe and the city’s police inspector (Luke Evans) try to put together the clues, racing from church to opera house to various mansions for the next revelation. Poe himself must provide a running commentary per the killer’s instructions, penning dreadful little tales ordered to appear in each morning’s newspaper.

Cusack, his goatee-framed mouth perpetually agape in combination of intellectual outrage and stunned revelation, has a fine time wallowing in Poe’s melancholia but cuts a more preposterous figure as a literary action hero â€" a deed few men, it must be said, are made for. While Cusack can handle the dark humor, he comes dangerously close to seeming like a parody â€" perhaps “John Wilkes Booth, Antebellum Exorcist.”

Director James McTeigue (“V for Vendetta”) juices up the 19th-century detective work with lethargic pistol play, galloping horse chases and gory corpses. But his villain â€" whose true identity could have been dreamed up by a screenwriting program after being fed the plots of “Silence of the Lambs,” “Seven” and “Copycat” â€" still dresses like The Shadow, while people say things like “Poe, you’ve done it again!” and “The ways of God and men, as in Providence, is not our way.”

Okay. After that, we’ll quote “The Raven,” nevermore.