John Cusack is a bit of a Hollywood oddity. There’s no pattern to the type of movie he will choose to do, so he’s always kept us on our toes. Sure, he’ll make a dumb action movie, but that will often afford him the chance to make a few smaller gambles later on. Up until the last few years he’s played the system very well, but recently his ethic appears to have, um, waned? A little?

Since the heady days of Say Anything and Sixteen Candles he’s come to represent a sort of slightly weird-looking, awkwardly charming, offbeat everyman that men aged 18-49 can look at and go ‘me’” – which is fine. There’s a place for that, as there is a place for most things in the movies. The man has made some good movies; no one can deny that. But the question I always end up asking myself is: are they good because he’s in them?

Regardless of whether your answer to that question is “yes, of course” or “well, maybe not” there came a tipping point in Cusack’s career and – because I’m the kind of unbearable git who’s fond of pointing to a particular point in time and declaring “here’s where it all went wrong” – I’m gonna say that it may well have been when even I, as a somewhat disenfranchised fan, got excited for The Raven. Cusack playing Edgar Allan Poe is a thing that should not have been able to fail, and yet we found ourselves wallowing in it nonetheless.

It’s not that we can’t accept that he’s capable of dishing us up a turkey. We’ve sat through Serendipity and we’re aware that Must Love Dogs is a thing that exists, but late at night when we’re tenderly fondling a copy of Con Air (…just me?), The Raven is the one that haunts us like the Tell-Tale Heart of bad Cusack movies.