Interesting beginning but horrible ending(s)

Rating: 3/10 (20 February 2005)

I have little tolerance for movies that begin well and end poorly. (I have far greater tolerance for movies that start shakily and end well.) "Constantine" was one of those movies that made me feel that it didn't know what it wanted to be about. Or it had too many ideas and didn't feel confident to run with any of them so it tried to use them all.
We have Constantine who is an exorcist dying of lung cancer. Okay, that's a little different. We have Rachel Weisz whose twin sister dies suspiciously. Okay. We have the two of them meeting ostensibly to find out what happened to the sister. Fine. These are the salient points of the movie as I see them however at the end of the movie, we seem to have false ending after false ending involving the son of the devil and Gabriel and going to Hell and we have the Mexican gentleman carrying that Sword around. Maybe I wasn't paying attention but who were all of those people in the mental institution that Keanu killed? Apparently they were demons but I didn't see an explanation for their presence. They were just there and then they were killed.
The one gaping flaw in the logic of this movie is that Constantine considers himself damned without chance of salvation because as a teenager he attempted suicide. The thing of it is is that he didn't succeed which gives him the opportunity to ask for forgiveness. Gabriel tells him at the beginning of the movie that his situation is hopeless (although he/she uses a different phrase). If Constantine wants to be saved, he simply has to ask for forgiveness. Period.
This renders all of his actions in the movie unnecessary (if they are, in fact, being done in order to save him).