Constantine
One thing's clear: R.J. Reynolds won't be showing "Constantine" at the company picnic any time soon.
As John Constantine, a film noir-style demon fighter who has been to hell and back before the movie even begins, Keanu Reeves puffs cigarettes the way some people pop Altoids, one after the other. He's paying the price for it, too: In an early scene, a doctor looks at an X-ray of the hero's ruined lungs and gives him six months to live. Actually, this is good news to Constantine. He tried suicide years before, but it didn't take.
"Constantine" is the latest example of the New Corporate Medievalism, that strain of millennial entertainment that takes the mopey nihilism of goth culture, fuses it with our current interest in angels and demons and other diversions from the business at hand, and serves it up with as many computer generated beasties as can fit on a screen. The movie has been adapted from "Hellblazer," a comic book -- excuse me, graphic novel -- that has been around in various forms since 1985, when celebrated comics writer Alan Moore came up with the character of John Constantine in an issue of "Swamp Thing."
Diehard fans of the comic -- sorry, graphic novel -- will probably be angry about the changes wrought here; for one thing, the setting is no longer London but Los Angeles, presumably so music-video director Francis Lawrence (making his feature debut) can stay close to his studio handlers. It could have been worse, though. The weather in this LA is actually rainier than in London, and "Constantine" is a lot better than "Van Helsing" and more professional than the "Blade" movies, if not quite as much fun as "Hellboy." Like all of them, it smacks faintly of bread and circuses, but at least you get your money's worth in CGI-overstim.
And it gives our man Keanu something to do other than sit around wondering why "The Matrix" series went south. Dressed in back-to-Bogart basics -- black suit, white shirt, loosened tie -- Constantine is called to a dingy apartment to exorcise Something Icky trying to escape from the body of a young Mexican girl. A little later he deals with a whirligig hellspawn, made of millions of beetles, that tries to mow him down on Figueroa Street. Then there are the bats that aren't really bats, flying nasties that Constantine dispels with a vial of flaming dragon's breath provided him by Beeman (Max Baker), the Q to his Bond. All in a day's work.
Something isn't right, though. Demons are supposed to stay inside the humans they possess, not clamber out to see the sights. "We're finger puppets to them, not doorways," says Chas (Shia LeBoeuf), the hero's teenage apprentice and driver. According to the film's potted cosmology -- part Catholicism, part Aleister Crowley, part stoned dorm-room heavy-metal riff -- only the Halfbreeds can walk among us. These are humans with red glowing eyes and good grooming who hang out at nightclubs. Metrosexuals, in other words. Chief among them is Balthazar, a viperish dandy portrayed with brio by ex-Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale. If you're a winged archangel you can visit Earth, too, which explains Gabriel, dressed in a pin-stripe suit and played by Tilda Swinton with the mad certainty of General George Armstrong Custer.
The busy plot involves the Spear of Destiny -- the weapon used by the Romans to kill Christ on the cross, don't you know -- and an attempt by the legions of Satan to gain entrance to our world through one of two psychic twin sisters, both played grimly by Rachel Weisz. One sister barely makes it past the opening credits; the other is a police detective who becomes Constantine's constant companion and something like a romantic interest. But, really, when the gates of hell are opening, it's not the best time for a date.
Also briefly glimpsed are Djimon Hounsou as Papa Midnight, a spectral barkeep in a pork-pie hat; Pruitt Taylor Vince as a priest who attempts to drink an entire liquor store; and, at the end, Beelzebub himself, played by Peter Stormare (the man who threw Steve Buscemi in the wood-chipper in "Fargo") as a decaying Las Vegas emcee who has a personal knowledge of every sin on earth.
Mostly, though, "Constantine" alternates between quiet, surprisingly dull scenes in which the hero and the girl talk in that italicized comic-book way about his past and orgies of computer pixels dressed up as gibbering fiends. The Soldier Demons in particular look like Gollum's bigger, badder, brainless brothers.
Reeves is made up to look like Death warmed over -- literally -- and he bites off a few choice one-liners. Sadly, though, the movie's idea of wit is an upraised middle finger rather than an upturned line of dialogue, and that leaves one of our most curious movie stars in the lurch. I've always thought of Reeves as our generation's answer to Gregory Peck: darkly handsome, earnestly stiff, and possessed with a spark of self-aware humor that saves his performances time and again. But he's moving into his 40s now and still slaying make-believe monsters at an age when Peck was fighting small-town racists in "To Kill a Mockingbird." You tell me: Which villain's more dangerous, really?
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