Movie Reviews: "The Raven"

[JamesG]

Movie Reviews: The Raven


It’s as if the makers of The Raven were begging for trouble. After all, they’ve made the victim of a serial killer who recreates Edgar Allan Poe’s lethal pendulum — a critic!

So now it’s time for the critics to strike a blow for one of their own — by slicing and dicing, not to mention rapping and tapping, this fanciful movie starring John Cusack as Poe.





Roger Ebert remarks in the Chicago Sun-Times:

“It is a grievous death, in which we’re expected to believe that a madman goes to astonishing trouble while killing a lot of people simply to devise an elegant puzzle for the hero to solve.”





What it all boils down to, writes Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe and Mail, is a:

“serial-killer flick with literary pretensions.”





But in creating such a concoction, John DeFore remarks in the Washington Post, the script writers make:

“little attempt to capture Poe’s idiom. … Like the recent Sherlock Holmes films, The Raven seems content to steal a famous figure’s name and leave any stabs at authenticity to the set and costume designers.”







Several critics suggest that it might be best to put literature and history aside and enter the theater with restrained expectations.




On that basis, Lou Lumenick in the New York Post writes:

“it's all good pulpy fun.”





Claudia Puig describes it in USA Today as:

“a moderately entertaining yarn.”





And Roger Moore in the Orlando Sentinel goes further.

“The Raven is a fanciful, witty and suspenseful revision of Poe’s last days that is more entertaining than it has any right to be.”

-IMDB News