Heaven Can't Wait
Keanu Reeves plays Man on Fire in the cool-as-ice "Constantine." (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: See Keanu Reeves go Biblical on Satan's butt.
The Downside: Style over substance
You know you're having a bad day when the angel Gabriel says to you, "Sorry... you're f***ed." John Constantine is having one of those kinds of days. Plagued since birth by visions of things he thought were delirious hallucinations, Constantine once tried (and partially succeeded) to commit suicide at a young age- hence in the old Catholic tradition damning his soul to Hell for all of eternity. Now he believes the only way to get back into the Man Upstairs' good graces is to prowl the streets looking for demonic "half-breeds," half-human, half-devil creatures, and dispatching them back to Hell. But this can't be an easy task when no one else sees the things you see, your apartment is essentially the attic of a 1970's vintage bowling alley, and you apparently own just one suit that never sees a wash day.
Constantine is a quintessential slick-as-grease popcorn movie. In a mid-winter season strangely packed with a menagerie of creaky fright-fests like Hide and Seek and Boogeyman, it is refreshing, and just a little reassuring, to see one done with a sense of style. It is a fairly empty diet- there isn't much here to chew on except what you can feed to the senses- but Constantine exudes a fairly cool, funky vibe. Picture last year's slightly dusty Van Helsing turned into a jazzy hip-hop track and you might have the idea.
John Constantine lives the Life of Requisite Solitude, only making appearances where his first-hand knowledge of the occult can be put to good use. In the beginning, we witness him banish a demon from a young girl using a tactic I'll say seems like it could only come from a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, but hey- whatever gets the job done. The incident strikes an unnerving chord with John. You see, apparently Earth lives in the midst of something called "The Balance" where God and Satan and their respective legions of angels and demons stay behind the lines and allow their half-breed proxies to exert influence in a wager to see if Good will really triumph over Evil. But if demons are trying to make their way into reality, that could only spell trouble.
Okay, I know what your thinking, but one of the charming aspects of Constantine is the way just about every plot point unabashedly registers a duh-rating of about 8.2, like in one moment where a Q-like sidekick of Constantine's (Max Baker) quips "This is very bad," while reading a revelation from Hell's Bible- as if you're likely to find any good news at all in Hell's Bible. Or the way the scenes set in Constantine's oddly spacious apartment allow us to constantly hear the police sirens outside, but oddly never the bowling alley one floor beneath of him. But why gripe? It can be a testimonial to what we really like about the sport of going to the movies seeing one like this- the very example of inanity, but one whose swagger pitches it up above its own preposterousness, and Constantine has plenty of tricked-out technique in its arsenal to rely on, although you could turn it into a little parlor game picking out all of its influences. Constantine is based on the graphic-novel Hellblazer by Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis, moving the story's action from Liverpool, England to the City of Angel all the while turning its hero from the blond-haired doppelganger of a certain pop-star to... Keanu Reeves. Reeves, looking further and further away from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, puts another spin on his "I know kung fu!" solemn, sour-puss persona, trying his best to communicate Constantine's isolation and loneliness pretty much by speaking in a low voice that will get certain parts of the audience checking the volume on their hearing aids. Reeves is a fairly one-note actor; it is lucky for us that Constantine works as a one-note character. He's kind of what you would get if Philip Marlowe wandered into The Seventh Seal; a straight-arrow, hard-drinking, chain-smoking gumshoe who gets his jollies taking the Fallen to the mat as opposed to gangsters and crooked politicians.
And like in a Raymond Chandler novel, everything is set in motion because of a dame.
This would be Angela (Rachel Weisz- whose name I constantly have to look up to see if I'm spelling it right), an LA cop whose sister commits suicide by leaping (Warning! Extraordinarily heavy religious symbolism ahead!) from the roof of an insane asylum adorned with a cross that stands taller than some apartment blocks. Angela is convinced that her sister wouldn't commit suicide (because, you see, she just wouldn't) and turns to the enigmatic Constantine for help. What happens next isn't of any global consequence, nor will it be any consequence to your enjoyment of the movie, although the story surrounds what seems to be the umpteenth attempt by the son of Old Scratch to make his domain on Earth, a practice he has tried and failed at so many times in the movies it makes you wonder if he had to go to school on the short bus as a kid. There is also the compulsory Lost Religious Relic, and a couple of glimpses into Hell itself, which in one of my few complaints I've got to say I wish looked more creative than Los Angeles after a Roland Emmerich movie gets done with it. But the ending is fairly sweet- I especially liked the way the plot twists on a take of damnation and salvation that is almost cruelly Darwinian- and makes perfect sense in a bizarre way.
Director Francis Lawrence (a first-timer) puts Constantine together in a rather compelling way that makes it move too fast to contemplate its comic book nature (unlike last December's unfortunate Blade Trinity, which left me completely unengaged). He makes no bones about the pulp nature of the story's origin and he shouldn't- there is no shame in a comic book move being a comic book movie as long as it doesn't insult the people trying to enjoy it. And Constantine gives us plenty to take home. I liked the way the half-breeds' eyes glow at just the right moment (green for the Saved, red for the Damned). I liked the images of a joint run by a former witch doctor named Papa Midnite (Djimon Hounou- this movie seems like a joke played on film critics with bad spelling) which is like a bar where both sides of the ecclesiastical divide can cavort together in an air of neutrality. But I especially liked Constantine's twist on some of the old action standards- it even includes a scene where, in an Ah-nuld inspired moment, the hero locks and loads as he prepares to go into battle with the forces of Hell.
Constantine isn't art- no one is going to be taking home gold statues for it come awards season, but it is a fine guilty pleasure. And why not? You've got to like the cojones of a movie where a man gives the Devil the finger as he ascends to Heaven- and you have to admire the subtle restraint of a film where muttering chants in Latin offs as many demons as a gun racked with silver bullets. Now that, as they say, is how we do that. B+
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