We're sorry for the joke, but it just can't be helped. We were always a bit wary of the premise for The Raven, what with John Cusack playing an Edgar Allen Poe whose stories have become the inspiration for a string of murders, and after watching the trailer we're tempted to preemptively mark the film as yet another disappointment in Cusack's filmography. When a serial killer writes you a letter challenging Poe to a "battle of wits", the story is all too nicely laid out. Nevermind that he then offers to leave clues. If there was something uniquely tying this to Edgar Allen Poe's history as a writer, The Raven might actually be an interesting idea. But this is just The Da Vinci Code or National Treasure, with murder, and a famous writer at its center. It wants to be closer to a Sherlock Holmes story, but it doesn't help that the dialogue all seems ridiculously expository.
Then again, maybe we're expecting too much. After all, this is a film by James McTeigue, whose career's only bright spot is V for Vendetta (and even that film has lots of problems) with The Invasion and Ninja Assassin being his other two "accomplishments".
We're also fairly positive that John Cusack's hair is channeling Nicolas Cage.
