Constantine

This movie was showing in the theater right next to Mel Gibson's newly recut and therefore no longer offensive Passion of the Christ. The two films have more in common than you may think. Both are based on Christian mythology, Gibson's film borrowing the hallucinations of a semi-crazed nun and Francis Lawrence's comic adaptation liberally pulling ideas from the writing of John Milton. Both attempt to understand the divine as that which balances out cruelty and darkness. And both of them go on about 15 minutes too long.

But I've got to say, I prefer Francis Lawrence's version of the whole Heaven/Hell, salvation/damnation game. Sure, it's a little labored considering the rather simplistic, familiar story it has to tell, but damned if it doesn't look good. And I prefer a nice, skeletal CG demon to a bald lady in a dark hood.



Keanu plays John Constantine, a man with the Haley Joel Osment-esque ability to see the undead walking around among us. Well, okay, they're not really undead. They're half-breeds, part-demons (or angels) and part-humans who travel around the Earth influencing human behavior. Constantine attempted suicide as a teenager, which according to those wacky Catholics, damns your soul to Hell for all eternity. And since John has the ability to travel to Hell whenever he wants, and it's kind of a depressing spot, he's decided to try and make it up to the Big Man Upstairs by exorcizing as many demons on Earth as possible.

With me so far? Good, cause it only gets more complicated from there. By the film's halfway point, we've seen the Spear of Destiny, psychic twins played by the always-fetching but never-quite-convincing Rachael Weisz, monsters made entirely of bugs, the Devil's Bible containing extra passages that don't appear in the traditional text, Djimon Hounsou as a witchdoctor who refuses to take sides between Heaven and Hell, the Son of Satan invading the body of some poor Mexican guy and the Angel Gabriel appearing on Earth in the form of Tilda Swinton.

Like I said, this movie is busy. It barely stops for a moment. And once you've waded through nearly an hour of heated, metaphysical conversations, you realize it all comes down to the Devil's kid wanting to appear on Earth and needing a host body and a relic in order to do so. Because, you know, that's only been the plot of 500 movies, and they figured we were due for one more.

But I don't mean to bash Constantine. It's not a bad movie at all. In fact, it's pretty damned entertaining. And for a film that's content to tell such a familiar story, it's got a tremendous amount of imagination. Some of the writing can be intensely labored (for example, Shia Lebouf's entirely obnoxious pseudo-comic sidekick), but when it works, it's actually pretty wry and clever.

An effort's been made to make Constantine something of an anti-hero, and Reeves pulls the role off swimmingly. It doesn't hurt that he's given a whole lot of nifty gadgets, and gets to dress like a Reservoir Dog the entire time, but this is still a pretty solid performance from an actor who has always taken an undeserved amount of shit from audiences and critics alike. A subplot about Constantine's ongoing battle with lung cancer, resulting from his chain smoking, comes off particularly well. In another movie, this could have seemed really preachy (after all, how many men Keanu's age come down with lung cancer, no matter how much they smoke), but there's enough gallows humor to make it feel appropriate.

But the real star here are the special effects. An early scene, in which a demon becomes trapped in a mirror after being exorcized, clues you in right away that the Computer Generated effects will be of the highest caliber. The monsters have real presence here, moving sinews and gnashing teeth, that brings their menace to life in a way few CG creations can manage.

As well, the visual conception is downright stunning. One of the script's best touches is its notion of parallel universes - rather than exist in the clouds or beneath the ground, Heaven and Hell in Constantine overlap our own world. They are all around us all the time, on another plane of existance. So, when you go to Hell from Los Angeles, you're in the LA section of Hell. It looks something like the post-apocalyptic world of the Terminator films, all wrecked cars, flaming debris and blown-out buildings.

This is a neat visual trick, but it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. It would seem to indicate that both Heaven and Hell are modeled structurally after the Earth. So, when something physical on the Earth changes (like, say, the construction of the city of Los Angeles), then it actually affects the architecture of Heaven. Which doesn't make a lot of sense. After all, Heaven was here first, shouldn't Earth then conform to look like Heaven instead of the other way around?

I, for one, hope that if there is a Heaven, it's nothing like Los Angeles. Even a cloudy, bright Los Angeles with no traffic. Although I guess in LA Heaven, you'd at least be able to get halfway decent pizza.

But I digress. My point was (I believe) that there is much to enjoy about Constantine. It's fairly smart, full of explosive effects and nifty visuals and features one of the better recent performances by the Man Who Would Be Neo. But I'd be lying if I said it didn't have some problems. At 2 hours, it's overstuffed, and a lot of the later twists and turns felt superfluous.

Movies like this always come down to the same basic concepts. The bad guys are always succeptible to simple things like holy water, crosses and brief Latin incantations. Just once, I'd like to see a supernatural religious thriller in which the hero says some "dominae espiritus" Latin chant and the demon just laughs at him without recoiling in horror. I mean, these guys can invade people's bodies, they can rip out your soul, they can survive in flaming hot sulfur for all of eternity, but they can't stand hearing a couple Our Fathers? There's so much creativity and imagination flowing through Constantine, it's amazing to me that it once more boils down to the same familiar ideas.