** (out of ****)
Starring Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz, Shia Laboeuf, Tilda Swinton, Djimon Hounsou, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Gavin Rossdale, and Peter Stormare
Directed by Francis Lawrence & written by Kevin Brodbin and Frank A. Cappello, from the comic book by Jamie Delano and Garth Ennis
2005
121 min R
“Are you superstitious?”
“No, I am a practicing Catholic.”
—from “The Phantom of the Opera” by Gaston Leroux
There are two kinds of filmmaker in this world. One walks into a gothic cathedral and wonders about the infinite. The other walks into that same cathedral and imagines how cool it would be to have a shoot-out in it. Guess which kind made “Wings of Desire” and which kind made “Constantine.”
“Constantine” is yet another comic book movie that reduces the mysteries of faith and religion to action movie clichés and video game logic. The devil is essentially a mob boss. Priests are gunfighters. Churches are where you get power-ups. The Wisecracking Sidekick is always asking The Hero when he can come along and fight bad guys. The Hero tells The Girl to wait in The Car but she doesn’t. Plate glass is shattered. Things are explained using “books not officially condoned by the Church.” The head of the clergyman sitting a few rows behind you in the theater explodes in consternation.
Yet, there’s really nothing artistic we can hold against the premise of “Constantine.” There are movies in which we wait with baited breath for a crucifix to be stuck on a screaming demon’s forehead, causing steam to pour forth. There are movies in which we giddily anticipate the old Irish priest going over to his cabinet to retrieve that old leather-bound volume “not officially condoned by the Church” that will explain everything that’s been vexing the hero, usually in a single evocative illustration. The phrase “not officially condoned by the Church” is usually enough to get me grinning. I saw that movie about a year ago. It was called “Hellboy” and I enjoyed it immensely. But while that film is filled with wit and whimsy, “Constantine” is dour, humorless, and sluggish. It takes over an hour to tell us what we already know from the trailer. And during that gloomy slog, comprised too largely of The Hero and The Girl rambling on about the nonsensical rules of their pseudo-Catholic universe with downcast eyes, all I could think about was how “Hellboy” lightened those moments by having someone apply a power-sander to his own head.
The premise is that John Constantine (Keanu Reeves) knows he is eternally damned because he tried to commit suicide when he was a teenager. Lucky for him, he can see the demons that are hiding everywhere, and so he’s trying to coax God into putting him back in the Almighty’s cool book by vanquishing as many demons as possible. Along comes a cop (Rachel Weisz) whose sister just jumped off the roof of a mental hospital. She thinks her sister was pushed. And word on the street is that Something Big is Going Down in the underworld. The notion that suicide is an absolute rejection of God, punishable by immediate damnation, is up for debate. Even if it is, the God in “Constantine” sure is a hardass for damning mental patients left and right.
Like most movies that don’t work, there are a couple scenes that give us a taste of what could have been. In this case, they involve the archangel Gabriel, played by actress Tilda Swinton as an impersonation of a young David Bowie. What she explains to Constantine, in a jumbled up, crazy way, is actually the nutshell of Christianity. No matter how many demons Constantine dispatches, she explains, he cannot earn his way back into heaven. That can only be done through God’s grace. And since Constantine has seen heaven and hell and chats regularly with angels and demons, what good is belief for him, when he has the certainty of what the rest of us can only take on faith? Does that put him outside the pale, does that make the rules different for him? For him, the matter to be taken on faith is that God is running the universe well. It’s not that he doesn’t believe in God or understand that it is grace that saves us, it’s that he thinks God is a prick and salvation through grace is a stupid way to run the universe. He doesn’t want to get into heaven because he likes God but because he doesn’t like the alternative.
And what a lousy alternative. If anyone ever films Dante’s “Inferno,” the FX guys from “Constantine” should be on the short list. Really, it’s lakes of fire and an orange sulfurous sky—pretty much what you would expect—but the clever touch is that “Constantine’s” hell occupies the exact same space as the real world. Keanu doesn’t so much “go” to hell as watch everything around him catch on fire, the trees wilt, and the buildings turn to rubble. But Los Angeles is still, essentially, Los Angeles. Oh yeah, and hell has its own bible, where things end differently. As for the rest of the movie, it’s atmospheric, but in a pedestrian way; about every third movie nowadays is a visual knockoff of David Fincher’s “Seven.”
Speaking of hell, Satan’s also pretty cool, as played by Peter Stormare in a white suit with a Southern accent. Although he doesn’t seem terribly bright. The universe, men of science tell us, is about 10-15 billion years old, so we have to imagine that the devil and all the other angels have been around at least that long. And if we assume that he only fell as mankind was coming into his own—that scene in “2001” where the monkey learned to use a stick—that still means that he has at least 50,000 years on Constantine. Even if you’re dumb enough to declare war on God, that’s an awful long time to be brooding and then still get outsmarted by a guy who starred in “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.” Sadly, Stormare’s Satan shows up less than Swinton’s Bowie-angel, which leaves us right back in Constantine’s gloomy office, where he and Rachel are still laying out all the rules for us in funereal voices. One wishes the priest from “Million Dollar Baby” could drop by and shut them all up.
Page two of "Constantine." Back to home.