Film Review - Constantine

Imagine a CGI-packed film with Keanu Reeves playing a reluctant hero with slick black hair and a big black coat.
It may sound slightly familiar, but this isn’t The Matrix, this is Constantine.
One is beginning to wonder whether Reeves can act opposite anything other than a blue wall.
He regurgitates his Matrix performance for this latest effort – a good versus evil tale that falls somewhere between Reeves’ previous CGI trilogy and The Exorcist.
He plays John Constantine, a chain-smoking sardonic with an uncanny ability to spot unworldly creatures such as demons and angels - and their human-disguised half-breeds - who (respectively) represent Satan and God on Earth.
While that’s a handy party-trick, it’s not a skill that gives you much comfort and by the time we join Constantine he’s dying of lung cancer from indulging in too many cigarettes.
He’s used to death though, having committed suicide once before. That should have sent him straight to hell but a pact with God saw him return to Earth to use his special skill to rid the world of half-breeds (and buy his way into heaven).
After the suicide death of her twin sister in a mental hospital, Los Angeles police woman and clairvoyant Angela (Rachael Weiss) enlists Constantine’s help to find out what really happened.
There isn’t as much religious symbolism as one might expect from a demon-fighting exorcist in modern LA. Here we have a religion two millennia old, rich with the symbolism of good, evil, power and eternity, and the film-makers give us a key-ring, an amulet and a hell that looked like hot day at Woolies car park.
The symbolism they did use seemed tacked-on and it was hard to credit the notion of protective powers held in a necklace when CGI demons missing half their heads were slinking towards their victim. Modern audiences don’t buy that in the same way they’d be hacked-off if someone killed a vampire with garlic.
If you’re religious sensitivities might be hurt by something as sacrilegious as a noted arch-angel appearing as an androgynous Judas, this probably isn’t the film for you. Nor, indeed, if you like your Satan scary - instead of an acerbic wit, with a hint of camp, in a dapper white suit.
Constantine is no alternative to Sunday Mass.
The story line is as thin as a Eucharist wafer and you’re left feeling so much money was advanced to the special effects unit there was none left to secure a good writer.
Religious-based notions of good and evil –angels and devils – are so deeply ingrained in our psyche that this film, if written well, could have been a psychological thriller. Instead, it relied heavily on horror-factor graphics that, with an MA Rating, seriously affect its ability to reach its target market – the readers of the DC Comics/Vertigo graphic novels on which this movie is loosely based.