Entertaining occult no-brainer

Rating: 7/10 (6 April 2020)

Damned P.I. John Constantine (Keanu Reeves) helps cop Angela Dodson (Rachel Weisz ) solve the mystery of her sisters suicide only to discover a hellish plot to install the Son of Satan as Lord of our mundane plane. This kind of mystic-mercenary battling Evil shtick has been around the block a few times, so don't expect anything new as the conflicted hero battles hordes of CGI with theologically-inspired (and silly-looking) weapons (such as a drum-fed holy-water firing cruciform hand-cannon). As usual Reeves is as wooden as a piece of the True Cross, but (again as usual) still manages to make his gloomy, cancer-ridden, Hell-bound character entertaining, Weisz is routine as the skeptic cop who is forced to accept unreality, the ever-malleable Tilda Swinton makes an intriguing androgynous Gabriel, but if you are expecting some awesome manifestation of the Lord of the Flies himself, you may find Peter Stormare's arrival a bit of a letdown. The film is full of images that aren't really explained (apparently sometimes due to expository scenes being removed in editing) and the plot dances around the concept of redemption, which plays a role yet generates a massive plot-hole. Typical for the graphic-novel inspired genre, 'Constantine' is long on imagery and short on pretty much everything else, but remains fast-moving entertainment (but more for the soul than the brain).