visually stunning and disappointingly empty

Rating: 3/10 (1 April 2008)

this movie is a case of miscasting so grossly blown over into something much worse. everyone else in the movie is about right, especially rachel weisz, who is as amazing as she usually is. the problem is the keanu reeves is not only utterly wrong for the part of constantine because he looks and sounds wrong (not being blonde or British) but because he's not a words actor. he's more of a facial expressions actor, and constantine is a fast talking con man character. instead of picking someone else who was more suited to the role, the people making this movie decided to write the script more around the way keanu would play the role, and so it really doesn't capture the charm of the hellblazer series: even when you're looking at something truly horrifying, even when he's standing over the body of someone who's been truly brutally murdered, for example, constantine manages to make the reader laugh, and that didn't really happen on screen. so the main character just falls flat and the whole film kind of disolves around it. despite the good performances by rachel and tilda and some of the others, the story without it's title character is just kind of lame.