More Over-Cooked Comic-Book Mayhem

Rating: Null/10 (20 July 2005)

Just when you thought comic-book movies couldn't get anymore crazy and over-cooked, along comes Constantine to raise the bar again. There appears no limit to the ability of comic book - excuse me, graphic novel - writers to concoct wacko scenarios out of random bits of pop culture flotsam (a little Exorcist here, a little Chandler there, a dash of Batman); and there also appears no limit to the willingness of movie studios to exploit the supposed built-in audience for this kind of dark, freakish crap. On the surface it would seem a good strategy, taking works from one graphic medium and translating them into another, but the problem is that there's more to making good movies than just morphing comic-book frames into film images. It takes more than graphic style to make good movies, a fact that becomes painfully clear when watching something like Constantine, a film that's as mind-numbing in the playing out of its story as it is impressive in its visual design.
The story isn't told so much as pounded into your brain. The protagonist, John Constantine, is one of these messed-up comic book anti-heroes, a guy who, if he weren't saving the world, he'd be off paying shrinks hundreds of dollars an hour to help him get over whatever childhood traumas were responsible for his being a sullen, chain-smoking wreck. As if Constantine's life weren't bad enough, he discovers that the earth is about to be beset by the minions of Satan's Son, and wouldn't you know it, he's the only one who can rescue humanity from this supernatural scourge. Or almost the only one. There happens to be another supernaturally-gifted character, a female cop named Angela (played by the always-succulent Rachel Weisz), except that Angela is in denial about her psychic gifts, not to mention being aggrieved over the recent suicide of her twin sister. Around these two complex-ridden characters swirls a world of pat comic-book duality, a world where heaven's representatives seek to balance the mischief carried out by the spawn of Hell - the kind of morally black-and-white world beloved of our two favorite Georges, Bush and Lucas. Not that you would expect moral complexity in a comic-book movie - it's not that easy to sell ambiguity to the masses (House of Sand and Fog was not a hit, in case you didn't notice). And neither would you expect restraint from a movie whose purpose is to sell itself as hard as it can to an audience made-up mostly of jaded action-movie fans, the kind of people who find Spider Man a little slow.
Constantine gives these graphic novel drones everything they could want and more: angels and devils, swarms of winged demons, visualizations of Hell where the world looks like Hiroshima at the point of the explosion. What distinguishes the film is the outrageous extent it goes to in exploiting people's enduring fascination with religious imagery, paraphernalia and ideas. The Exorcist was once the last word in religious porn, but Constantine has usurped it. John Constantine is trying to buy his way into heaven after being condemned to Hell for committing suicide; Angela's sister Isabel was a devout Catholic whose soul is damned because she jumped off a building; Constantine's buddies are a psychic-priest and some other squirrelly guy who lives in a bowling alley and deals in rare religious artifacts (he has a copy of the extended bible, the one normally only found in Hell). It's hard, seeing how insistent the film is in selling its rather pornographic version of religion, not to be a little unsettled (especially when you consider how well this kind of stuff tends to go over with people who consider themselves religious), but it's not really crassness that does the picture in, it's plain-old Hollywood shoddiness. For all its outward gall the movie is rather pedestrian, the storytelling rather flaccid. The surface may be brimming with imagination, but underneath is the same old save-the-world jive, the same old comic-book hokum.
You might expect a little infusion of charm from Keanu Reeves, an actor who is normally at least watchable, but the sound and fury of Constantine so drowns-out his laid-back personality that he's reduced to a video game character, a dully enigmatic figure marching grimly through level after level of computer-generated carnage. This isn't the kind of movie that emphasizes the personality of an actor, and it isn't the kind that goes for much sex-appeal either, as evinced by the fact that Keanu and Rachel Weisz, two of the hotter people on the planet, manage to generate about zero sexual spark (which is about as much as Keanu had with Carrie-Anne Moss in The Matrix Trilogy). The producers of this kind of movie seem almost contemptuous of the idea of any spontaneous human quality, erotic or otherwise, breaking through the over-designed, over-sold surfaces of their commodity-films. To let actors fling off the kind of nervous, quirky energy that makes for good viewing would represent a threat to the machine-tooled product, so we end up with performances so two-dimensional, so styled to fit in with the overall visual scheme, that one wonders why actors are employed at all. Don't directors care about what people like Keanu Reeves and Rachel Weisz can bring to a film? I guess that's a silly question given the kind of money that's on the line with a movie like Constantine - the kind of money that precludes the possibility of any messy humanity being allowed to get in the way.