Constantine (2005)
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Directed by Francis Lawrence
Screenplay by Kevin Brodbin and Frank A. Cappelo
Based on a graphic novel by Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis
For those of you unfamiliar with the Hellblazer comic, a little introduction. John Constantine is essentially a douchebag—a cocky, swaggering, overconfident chain-smoker. He gets things done through application of learned magics, but mostly just gets people killed. He has just enough charm to get some people to do whatever he wants while sickening everybody else. Watching him in action carries the simultaneous visual allure and repulsion of watching someone smoke through a trachaeotomy. It's not for the faint of heart or stomach, but it's somehow jarringlly intense for the rest of us. For example, in one of the comic book's storylines, Constantine is put into a drug-induced coma, and while there finds John F. Kennedy wandering between worlds; his ghost has been holding his brains in with his right hand since the assasination. That's just not going to fly in the movies.
So while it was a bit disappointing to see such a dramatic departure, I expected tremendous liberties to be taken. Who wouldn't? The comic version of Constantine is, after all, a blond-haired guy with a heavy British accent. It's kind of hard to imagine how Keanu Reeves got the role. He swings it with an American accent, which is fine by me. I saw Mr. Reeves attempt a British nobleman in Bram Stoker's Dracula , and it wasn't pretty.
We begin the movie dismantling of the Constantine persona by borrowing heavily from Hellblazer story arc called Dangerous Habits . It's no mystery why this particular one was chosen, as it goes to great lengths to show us how terrible a smoking habit can be. We even get, at one point in the film, an extreme close-up of the surgeon general's warning—no kidding. And since I believe not even my little insignificant movie review is exempt from the torch-weilding soccer-mom brigade's tireless efforts to portray cigarette smoking in the most negative way imaginable, here is my disclaimer.
Hey kids, smoking is really, really, really bad for you. Now, what the hell are you doing in this R-rated movie?
Scaling back the gruesome underpinnings of Hellblazer nonwithstanding, there are a few things here that are a bit derivative. For starters, Keanu Reeves is playing John Constantine the same way he plays all his tough guys. That is, in an angst-ridden, peevish manner perfectly summed up by a sulking junior-high school student flipping the bird. One of Constantine's allies, adorning him with various magical doohickeys and demonic gadgetry (i.e.: a pistol that shoots dragon breath), is simply a fantasy-fiction version of Q from James Bond. Also, this film employs a really cheesy gimmick where holy objects are often used as weapons, so you run into things like crosses being used as the shaft of a Tommy gun. Another Keanu Reeves movie, Johnny Mnemonic , features a guy with a blade shaped like a cross, and it wasn't really neat back then, either.
The main thrust of the plot hinges on the absurd, and I don't mean the demon world, the spells, the Hell-Bible, malevolent spirits made of insects, and the relative effectiveness of Shia LaBeouf as an action hero. I mean the fact that this movie also expects me to believe that after a police detective specifically seeks out John Constantine for magical consultation after she suspects her sister's suicide was influenced by… I don't know, demons maybe—that upon convincing him to help her—she would then not believe a single word he has to say. First he's showing her the door, then he's chasing her through the street selling her on the cockamamy dumbshit explanations she was seeking in the first place. Look lady, you're either after a supernatural explanation or you're not. Decide which it is and stop wasting the movie's runtime. The rest is jammed between devil-may-care blasphemy and hysterical, Revelations-type Biblical happenings. It's enough to make you want to smack the screenplay writer.
And still I enjoyed the movie. I know… shocking, right? They managed to get everything wrong, but in doing so, they still made an entertaining film. It's fun, has excellent performances, great cinematography, and a fast-paced exciting story that has a wonderful climactic end. It's not really Constantine in attitude or appearance, but I guess that doesn't matter, does it? This film could have been made and been just fine without using Hellblazer as its basis. With little effort, this idea can be scrapped and restarted, especially since Keanu Reeves won't do a sequel. What's funny is people are actually saying there's no way it can be done by anyone else. Perhaps that's not funny haha, but funny— strange .
Review by James Scotto-Lavino
OVERALL: x
(Acting: 4, Plot: 2.8, Visuals: 3.2, Wanchy: 3.7, WTF: x)
WTF deductions: