Originally published 2/19/2005
Constantine
Director: Francis Lawrence
Writers: Story by Kevin Brodbin, Screenplay by Kevin Brodbin and Frank Cappello, based on the DC/Vertigo comic book Hellblazer
Producers: Benjamin Melniker, Lauren Shuler Donner, Erwin Stoff, Michael E. Uslan, Lorenzo DiBonaventura, Akiva Goldsman
Stars: Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz, Djimon Hounsou, Shia LaBeouf, Max Baker, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Gavin Rossdale, Tilda Swinton, Peter Stormare
Hollywood needs to re-think demons, in my opinion. In almost every cinematic Last Days smackdown, demons are depicted as gruesome creepy-crawlies, Bosch/George Romero hybrids that like to jump and hiss and thrust their hideousness at you. In Constantine, based on the comic book Hellblazer, we see one get its kicks by terrorizing a poor kid on a city bus. Is it not enough that they’re going to devour your immortal soul and torment you for eternity if you sin? Do they have to look like rabid skin care ad cautionary tales while they’re doing it?
For all its attitude, and for all its colorful and imaginative visuals, in the end Constantine settles for being another movie about ugly things leaping into the camera frame accompanied by stings of music. And the war between Heaven and Hell is just another framework for shooting and one-liners. This stuff can be done well, and director Francis Lawrence keeps the energy up and doesn’t get distracted from the story by the camera whirligigs he brought with him from the music video world, but for all the money on-screen the movie doesn’t click fundamentally enough to rise above its genre trappings.
That boy on the city bus is John Constantine (played as an adult by Keanu Reeves), who from birth has had a psychic gift that allows him to see angels and demons roaming the Earth. He grew up troubled by these visions, was institutionalized, then tried to kill himself and spent two minutes in Hell. He’ll tell you it felt like a lot longer than that.
While in Hell he learned the truth about what goes on back on Earth – God and the Devil made a pact not to directly intervene with humans in their war to accumulate souls, only to subtly influence through supernaturally-powered intermediaries that walk hidden among us – “half-breeds”, Constantine calls them. Although he knows attempting suicide condemns him to Hell, Constantine hopes that by finding and destroying enough evil half-breeds, he can earn some chits with the people upstairs.
It’s said that his is the only soul Satan himself (Peter Stormare) will come to Earth to retrieve, and it won’t take long now. He has severe lung cancer, and of all people it’s the archangel Gabriel (Tilda Swinton) who explains: it’s “because you’ve smoked 30 cigarettes a day since you were 15”. Reeves does his part by coughing in every third scene.
He’s not eager to go back below – “imagine being sentenced to a prison where half the occupants were sent there by you” he points out. Yes, eternal torment is bad enough, but in place where people are angry at you…
He lives in a cavernous apartment lined with runes and Sparkletts bottles filled with holy water. If I have my geography correct, it’s directly above the Shatto 39 bowling alley near the Wiltern Theatre. The bowling there is cheap and they have decent bar food, and to date I have never seen a demon.
To this odd home comes Angela Dobson (Rachel Weisz), a hardened police detective with impeccable eyeliner who every so often doesn’t sound like a British actress trying an American accent. Her twin sister has recently committed suicide, but Angela is convinced there was something more sinister to it, despite that the mental hospital where Isabel stayed has video of the suicide. In one of the grimmest bits of product placement I’ve ever seen, they actually give Angela the video and she watches it over and over again on Apple Quicktime.
Side note: Could we agree to a moratorium on naming heroines “Angela” in religious-themed thrillers?
This eventually mutates into a fate-of-all-mankind struggle involving Satan’s equivalent of God’s son Jesus, and the Spear of Destiny, the weapon that killed Jesus on the cross and has been missing since World War II. Constantine must fight off some demons, take a trip to Hell, and generally save the day.
One of the demons looks a lot like the R-Rated version of the Oogie-Boogie Man from The Nightmare Before Christmas, and there are other flashes of imagination and gallows wit. I particularly like a couple of morbidly funny billboards that pop up here and there, and Constantine’s habit of making bewilderingly specific requests – “I need a mirror! At least three feet high! Quickly!”
Reeves, to his credit, doesn’t sound like the remedial surfer for once, but many of his mannerisms seem aped from Clint Eastwood. Implacability and cold aggression are not the strongest weapons in Keanu Reeves’s acting arsenal, but he wrenches some laughs from the material. There’s a strong supporting turn from Djimon Hounsou as Papa Midnite, an ex-Witch Doctor who now runs a bar where angels and demons can let their hair down on neutral ground, and Peter Stormare’s finicky and childish Satan is one of the more unforgettable Princes of Darkness we have seen on screen – The Beast with just a touch of Paul Lynde.
The tone lurches from dark humor to spook house seat-buzzer fright and doesn’t do it smoothly, and the story is often needlessly slow to unfold. Constantine and Angela are contrived to meet twice before they have any reason to talk to each other, and the rules of what can and cannot happen and who is capable of doing what are never solidly explained enough to feel less than arbitrary. Eventually you just give up and watch the fireworks.
If you’re even following the plot enough to realize there must be someone on Earth commanding this conspiracy, you can unmask the villain easily enough by playing the usual game of identifying the most prominent and talented actor who has only had one useless expositional scene in the first two-thirds of the movie. If I could I’d ask for a moratorium on that old trick, too, but the movie business doesn’t shake its habits easily. I’d sooner believe that John Constantine will actually quit smoking.