Policewoman Angela Dodson (Rachel Weisz) seeks the aid of demon hunter John Constantine (Keanu Reeves) in finding the secret behind her twin sister’s alleged suicide. The trail will lead them to demons, angels, Hell, and the Spear of Destiny, the weapon that kill Christ and may be the key to the destruction of the world.
I don’t own a lighter. That’s really my problem. You see, cool guys have lighters, and I don’t mean any modern plastic thing; I’m talking about old-school, metal lighters that ‘tink’ when you close them. They need to do that as that’s the sound of coolness. And John Constantine is so very cool. That lighter never stops ‘tinking.’ I suppose he could have done more cool things, or better yet, turned down the angst several notches, but no, it’s all about the lighter.
Constantine, on the other hand, is all about the look, and it’s got one. Darkened streets, post-apocalyptic Hell, winged angels, scuttling demons, and they all look cooler than a man with two lighters. If you can ignore the excessive number of high, overhead shots and some absurd camera angles (you really need a reason to tilt a scene forty-five degrees), the movie looks great. Score one for the art director and several more for the special effects team.
There should be more supernatural noirs. Horror lends itself to the noir style and structure, yet I can only think of a half dozen. Like its older cousins, this is a film about a flawed man, in a very flawed world, solving a mystery. For a story about the destruction of our happy existence, as well as suicide and lung cancer, it is emotionally distant, but then noirs often are, except for an overriding feeling of hopelessness. There’s a bit more hope here. Just a bit. I can’t say I cared about the plight of humanity or Constantine’s fate, but that’s alright as after each look into the dark soul of man and the cruelty of higher powers, we are zapped to another action scene or trek into perdition’s flame.
I will bow to the story’s complexity and twisted Catholic mythos (varying from what I recall from my long ago catechism class), as it was stolen from the best. I can let the similarities to The Exorcist go as an homage, but the pillaging of The Prophecy crossed the line. Explaining the looting would give away the ending of both films, so suffice it to say that if you’ve seen The Prophecy, you’ve seen Constantine.
I enjoyed Constantine in the same way I’ve enjoyed the strand of action horror pictures that have arisen in recent years, like Blade and Van Helsing. They don’t leave me thinking, but they are pretty.
A criticism coming from comics fans is that the film changes the appearance of John Constantine (brunet instead of blond) and his nationality (he’s a Brit in the comics). This is a very superficial complaint; similar thinking has propagated long established racism in comics. But I dismiss it even before worrying about it triviality and connotations because this is a movie, its own movie. It isn’t a comic book. The comics still exist. There are many attributes I use when evaluating a film: faithfulness is not one of them.