More Proof That a Committee Can’t Write an Action Movie.

Rating: 3/10 (22 February 2005)

More Proof That a Committee Can’t Write an Action Movie.
“Constantine” wouldn’t have been as bad as it was—Oh, and it was VERY bad—if it could only have been made by one person. As it was, it was just another demonstration of the wickedness of ‘art-by-committee’—another instance of a budget in search of a script. It might well have been dazzling if one person could have made the movie as a matter of personal vision—as an honest interpretation of the comic book on which it is based—but as it was, it had to do more things than any movie should be expected to and still be put in front of a poor, suffering audience.
Constantine’s second big problem is writing: it comes close to, but never really reaches the quality of writing that made people read the Constantine comic books. Despite its emphasis on action, its plotting is nerve-janglingly tedious in places; leading to a movie with a target audience divided between two main groups: comics fans who will pay to see anything that had ever appeared in sequential art, and people so stupid you wonder how it is they don’t need life support. In the long run, neither of them will be fully happy with this movie.
The first of “Constantine’s” burdens is its never-to-be-understood, need to give Keanu Reeves a job: this does bad things to the movie on many levels.
For people who wanted to see the comic book character, John Constantine, convincingly brought to the screen, Reeves is a disappointment. In the comics, Constantine is a blond Englishman from (at best) the lower-middle classes with all that you come to expect from that in terms of accent, slang and devastating sarcasm. Reeves’s Constantine by contrast has none of the original character’s, well, *characteristics* and isn’t enough of an actor to recreate them. This leaves Reeves straight-jacketed into playing the ‘for dummies’ version of a film-noir detective.
For Reeves, this means a flat and angry affect while spitting out one-liners about the nature of Christian theology with its view of God and the Devil (one really good line describing God as a guy with an ant-farm), which are the real point of the Constantine books—unfortunately if you have ever read them, coming from Reeves’s mouth, they serve only to remind you what the movie lacks. It is truly hard to do justice to how really bad Reeves is and what that does to the movie until you’ve seen it and, mulling it over an hour afterward, you suddenly realize that everyone down to the bit-players—pretty much everyone with a speaking role—acts circles around him.
Warning: spoilers below!
Rachel Weisz, a British actress talented enough to portray Americans in several previous movies is entrusted with wordless reaction shots that a director would hang himself before giving to Reeves.
The occult bar owner, Midnight, portrayed by, Djimon Hounsou (Gladiator, the Four Feathers et al), puts an intense and nuanced performance into his five minutes of screen time.
Even Peter Stormare, who makes a brief appearance as Satan, infuses his performance with intimations of things going on beneath the surface, overlaying a human face on a contained embodiment of unimaginable evil.
Tilda Swinton’s performance as the angel Gabriel (who desires to see mankind be worthy of divine love that it makes her attempt to destroy the creation) gives a wonderful performance as a gigantically smug, self-satisfied, higher being.
When all is said and done, “Constantine” is a movie and it is worth seeing, but not for ten dollars in a theater. It’s worth the cost of a video rental if you live in a small town, can walk to the shop, and get it back in time to avoid the late fee, but that is exactly what it is worth and nothing more than that.
Constantine is made to please a bunch of non-people; theaters filled with Frankenstein-like statistical abstractions. Written to please comics geeks whom the studios and critics hold in contempt while attracting equally faceless action movie-goers, Constantine is a document incapable of keeping faith. It isn’t true to writing, it isn’t true to the idea that we are individuals with individual tastes, nor is it, as the scene where the ultimate nihilistic cynic’s giving up smoking demonstrates, true even to itself.
It isn’t entertainment, its information.