crap, in biblical proportions

Rating: 2/10 (10 February 2005)

Constantine has one redeeming quality. Peter Stormare plays Satan, and he's characteristically great, creating what may be the best Lucifer since Pacino. You could also add Tilda Swinton as Gabriel and Djimon Hounsou as "Papa Midnight" as secondary and tertiary redeeming qualities, but that's up for debate.
Other than that, this movie is terrible. The screenplay is so flat and weakly written it was almost offensive to watch, and the directing is gimmicky garbage. Some of the special effects are nice and the production design has its moments, but the visuals are certainly nothing to rave about.
There is obvious cinematic potential for the comic book character Keanu Reeves plays, but his wooden style should never be combined with such a monstrously bad screenplay. He could have been a kind of demon-fighting Bogey - instead he's more like a bad Columbo impersonation. Rachel Weisz would make a nice entry in a wet T-shirt contest, and she seemed game to deliver a good performance too, but the absence of any sort of consistency in her character eliminated that possibility.
Personally, I am getting tired of music video directors who confuse "a random combination of nice-looking angles" with "cool" and writers who confuse a "a smattering of religion, faux-hip settings and genre-bending clichés" with "interesting." I think we're going to have to face the fact that, no matter how cool some geek thinks it is in his mind, a fusion of the occult and sci-fi will never make a half-decent movie. And the fact that religion has inspired so many awful supernatural flicks lately is as strong an argument as any to go atheist.
If there is a sequel, and it is called "The Adventures of Satan" starring Peter Stormare, I will see it. Otherwise, I will not give this lowly film a second thought.