'The Pale Blue Eye' review: Christian Bale drama is a serious disappointment

WHAT IT'S ABOUT A murder mystery set at the United States Military Academy at West Point circa 1830, "The Pale Blue Eye" reunites writer-director Scott Cooper with his frequent star Christian Bale ("Hostiles," "Out of the Furnace").

In this cinematic adaptation of the 2003 novel by Louis Bayard, Bale plays the detective Augustus Landor, brought in by the academy's leadership to investigate after a cadet is found slain in a gruesome fashion.

Landor teams up for the investigation with none other than Edgar Allan Poe (Harry Melling) himself, then a cadet at the academy who had only begun to develop his literary voice. 

This work of historical fiction features a robust ensemble behind Bale and Melling, including Robert Duvall, Timothy Spall, Gillian Anderson, Toby Jones and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

MY SAY The elements promise something memorable: a fascinating historical moment rife with dramatic possibilities, an epic sensibility that comes through in sweeping shots of the snow-covered, mountainous Hudson Valley landscape and the prestige provided by Bale and the rest of the cast.

Plus, in movies ranging from the aforementioned collaborations with Bale to "Crazy Heart," the 2009 picture that finally won Jeff Bridges his Oscar, Cooper has shown a gift for intelligent genre filmmaking.

So even as it becomes clear that "The Pale Blue Eye" will waste all of that potential behind a generic potboiler narrative and endless scenes of characters having stilted procedural conversations, set to an overbearing mystery movie score, hope remains that it's got to turn itself around.

But even if you're still tempted to fire it up on Netflix, don't be fooled: It doesn't. 

Content to present a detective story that could just as easily have taken place any time and anywhere, without more than a passing nod to the larger political forces shaping this fraught moment in West Point's first decades, "The Pale Blue Eye" hardly even takes advantage of the grand Gothic setting.

There's an excess of pretty images, of course, including the camera soaring over the dead-of-winter terrain, brooding scenes by candlelight and hazy nighttime encounters, but almost no tangible atmosphere.

The presence of Poe as a major part of the picture also gets squandered. "There's definitely something peculiar about him" is how he's described on-screen, which is surely an accurate assessment but also seems to have been the entire conceptual approach.

He's a shrill nuisance, provided dialogue that's essentially garbled nonsense masquerading as poetic observations. Melling and Bale operate on such vastly different wavelengths that they're never convincing as partners in this investigation, there's nothing learned that might further illuminate our understanding of Poe's nascent years and you wish the movie had just left the great young writer out of it completely.

Bale brings the expected gravitas to his role and there's no questioning the quality of the casting. To the extent that any of this works at all, it's because Cooper has lined up an impressive collection of character actors.

But they're here in service of a story more befitting a paperback found at the back of an airport bookstore than a worthwhile movie.

BOTTOM LINE A serious disappointment.