Goth comic-book thriller that eventually picks up steam

Rating: 6/10 (1 April 2005)

The mix of comic book action and palpitating priests hardly led me to expect the sort of film I might enjoy and I had to restrain myself for the first half hour of Constantine from walking out. It's like X-Men meet the Exorcist. Keanu Reeves wanders in as if he's still in The Matrix, this time calmly exorcising heavy-duty CGI demons from hapless muggles. The slim (very slim) basis of all this is that he who holds the Spear of Destiny (that, according to the gospels, killed Jesus) rules the world. Spear has been found (shades of Tolkien's Ring) and sets off all sorts of strange goings on. There is a wafer thin line between heaven and hell, which is reality as we know it. God and the Devil have fun playing at keeping a perfect balance and it takes a strange event (such as the reappearance of the Spear after it had been hidden at the end of World War II) to allow any creature from either 'side' to manifest in the real world.
The trick to enjoying Constantine I discovered is not to treat it as a horror film but as some updated goth battle of good and evil. Perhaps for Roman Catholics (who probably believe in that particular version of heaven, hell, the power of the church etc), films like Constantine - and the Exorcist for that matter - hold more terror. After all, if we think we might go to Roman Catholic purgatory, a story about it is more scary than if we don't, right? The other side of the coin can be seen if we watch early Japanese horror movies that rely on their (to us, equally innocuous) mythology and ghostworld bogeymen.
But once you buy into the genre (think Spiderman, Blade, The Crow) it becomes reasonably entertaining. The appearance of Tilda Swinton as the Archangel Gabriel adds a somewhat novel touch and prevents the otherwise fairly predictable action from getting staid. Constantine is enjoyable enough at a push - or push it to one side for the much better offerings that are available in its genre.