Hollywood, please read: LOOKS AREN'T ENOUGH

Rating: 1/10 (31 March 2005)

Good luck identifying with this brooding guy with no identifiable day job but an extremely swell apartment in New York who's trying to avoid hell since his suicide attempt at 15 which was brought on by his confinement in an insane asylum because his parents didn't get his ability to see supernatural beings and who personally knows archangels and chats with Satan in a white suit and who seemingly lives on cigarettes and is now helping a gorgeous NYPD detective to find out whether her sister really did commit suicide and go to hell and whether she was also in touch with demons. Oh, and a shabby Mexican is making his way northward with the spear that stabbed Jesus on the cross. I dunno, just not your universal human predicament for me.
I'm already imagining the director's commentary on the film's appearance when the DVD is released. "We wanted to achieve a very spare, yet threatening look, very futuristic and grim. So we dressed people in black and white, and we showed hell as being very red in color. There's a demon right there, yup. Oh, that demon was designed by Milford Berman, he's a real genius." Movies with these ridiculous stakes--WILL mankind survive?--have no suspense anyway; I mean, the mere fact that I'm sitting in a theater in Los Angeles surrounded by other people pretty much serves as a spoiler. As for Constantine's stakes--WILL he go to eternal damnation?--I'd rather see a human being avoid hell on general principles, but that's all that carried me along in this film.
You'll hear about Rachel Weisz, and she serves as well as Maria Bello or Natalie Portman or Liv Tyler or Claire Forlani or any host of interchangeable medium-hotties would have.