I’m going to assume by now that you’ve seen the trailer for The Raven, a film by V For Vendetta director,
James McTeigue. You know the premise: a fictional Edgar Allan Poe
(John Cusack) is helping hunt down a serial murderer, who seems deeply
inspired by Poe’s work. This story is told through a series of chase scenes,
shootouts, and other movie clichés.
To say that the plot unfolds without originality would be a
complete understatement. This is a formula movie, and a very poor one at
that. The Raven displays a visual style that seems to strive
for mediocrity, and only succeeds at reaching that level some of the
time. The film shows very little creativity in its visual style, and
sometimes it looks downright ugly.
The cinematography is as formulaic as the film’s script -- every
shot seems borrowed from somewhere else; every scene seems crafted
around a stale idea from the past. While I expected to see a film heavily
influenced by past “whodunits”, The Raven fails so completely to deliver anything original that it seems like little more than a cheap knockoff.