Not as bad as I would have thought

Rating: 6/10 (9 February 2005)

I saw a sneak preview last night. And I was pleasantly surprised, in that the film was not awful as I was afraid it would be. Bear in mind, I am a huge fan of the comic books, so I was feeling pretty uncharitable towards this one as soon as I hear that John Constantine would be American and played by Keanu Reeves. But surprisingly, he does an...okay job. He's not the unrepentant bastard that the comic book character is. But I wouldn't have expected that take from Hollywood. He does an interesting interpretation of the comic book character, a watered-down version to be sure: but still entertaining. He had a couple of good lines here and there, and used some cool little 'magical' spells to do his thing in the movie. Tho the cross-shaped magic shotgun was sort of dumb. So take it from a semi-hardcore Hellblazer comic geek: this wasn't all that bad. I freely admit that my opinion is tainted by the fact that I saw it free of charge.