Dreary Raven never reaches potential

The Raven is an interesting concept for a movie. It just never reaches it's potential.

The film takes many liberties in telling a story where Edgar Allen Poe's fictional works (The Masque of the Red Death, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Pit and the Pendulum) are used as inspiration for a serial killer. For additional intrigue, it's set days before Poe's true mysterious death (historians can't agree on what happened, which has lead to many myths) on Oct. 7, 1849. Interesting? Yes. Something worth suspending beliefs? Sure. Sadly, it just ends up being a bit messy whodunit. Boo!

The movie begins with Poe (John Cusack) getting kicked out of bar, meanwhile the first grisly copycat murder takes place. Poe is briefly a suspect, and then joins Baltimore Detective Fields (Luke Evans) on the case to solve the crimes. Poe gets emotionally involved after his beloved Emily (Alice Eve), his love interest in the movie, is taken by the lunatic recreating Poe's dark, gruesome stories. Suddenly, Poe is a bit of an action star and sleuth. Hmmm.

My husband and I walked out thinking that the movie producers had to be trying to capitalize on the success of Sherlock Holmes and our recent love for gore. The problem is the screenplay wasn't written as sharply, nor did it move with the same cadence of Sherlock Holmes. Besides, John Cusack isn't Robert Downey Jr. And some of the gore just seemed over the top. Then again, the crimes recreates some of Poe's disturbing deaths. Still, the film just didn't win me over. My rating: D+.

Rated R for bloody violence and grisly images. This really is one for grown-ups and possibly older teens who are used to seeing gore. Among the images: nearly severed head, spurting blood, a person sliced in half, lots of blood on dead bodies, a cut off human tongue and a raccoon eating a human heart.