Misbegotten mostly boring mumbo jumbo

Rating: 2/10 (17 January 2008)

Reviewer Karilee wrote "Constantine is another one of those movies that you either love or hate". I disagree. I just watched it and found it "ho-hum": mildly interesting, definitely not a great movie, not even a consistently exciting or entertaining one. I only gave it 2 stars, but I don't hate it: hate gets zero.
What is exciting? Well, in the first action scene John Constantine exorcises a demon from a hispanic girl in a slum bedroom, capturing it (presumably according to some unmentioned traditional superstition) in a mirror which he then throws out of the upper storey tenement window so that it smashes on the street outside, freeing the girl. Perhaps because this was near the beginning, we were only given the briefest glimpse of the demon; it seemed interesting, so it would have been nice to have a proper look at it.
Next, after Constantine meets up with the surviving twin Angela, she says she doesn't believe in the devil; the street lamps are then gradually extinguished, and a flock of winged demons attack and are demolished by our hero setting light to a bit of rag (we are not told how this works). Again, we get only the briefest glimpse of the demons, almost at subliminal level.
Not exciting but visually and conceptually interesting are scenes where Constantine enters Hell. It looks like a city slum Blitzed then fire-bombed, with added crawling (because this time wingless) demons. The scene is not so brief as the attacks in the everyday world, so one gets a proper chance to look at it and take the special effects in; but it isn't exciting, just interesting --- but only to a movie art critic.
What of the story? Well, in the comic book Constantine's origin is Liverpool. That explains the theology, perhaps, for this concoction could perhaps only come from minds preoccupied with Roman Catholic mediaeval mythology. Pictures and action plot could have come from science fiction, but as with Hellboy the ontology is straight out of the darkest era of the Spanish Inquisition.
In that context, this is a very frightening movie, simply because of the world-view presented of hell, of demons, and of the Roman Catholic view of "the hereafter", including the belief that (in Constantine's words to Angela about her sister Isabel) the fate of a person who commits suicide is to have her body torn to pieces amid everlasting fire, to be in excruciating agony that will be repeated again and again throughout eternity. I do not mean it is frightening to us all if we do not believe such superstition; rather that it might frighten us how many of those without critical intellectual faculties who see this movie could go away impressed by the world-view presented. Let us hope that most of every audience realize it is just as much fantasy and mumbo-jumbo as the plots of out-and-out fantasy stories such as Legend (1985), Dragonheart (1996) or The Lord of the Rings.
Our hero's own life story, fate, mission, and destiny are equally terrifying. As a teenager, we gather, he was sufficiently unhappy to attempt suicide, from which he was rescued (as presumably quite often happens) in an Accident and Emergency ward. In this movie's theology, he is therefore condemned to an eternity in hell for the mortal sin of self-murder; and even though he dedicates his life to tracking demons that have escaped into our world, in particular demons that "possess" unfortunate human beings in the classic manner, and to sending them back to Hell where they belong, Constantine can never redeem himself from his ultimate fate. Now, any impressionable teenager with a Christian religious upbringing who has not yet shaken it off could take this plot line as meaning that if you survive attempted suicide you will go to hell however hard you struggle to live a good life afterwards; such a teenager could, accepting this counsel of despair, resolve rather than leading a good life to be as wicked as possible, just to spite the angels, as it were. This is a very bad message for a movie with the pretensions of this movie to be giving to the young and impressionable. And it is perhaps likely that, apart from the small audience that are mere connoisseurs of the Gothic horror comic book genre, much of the biggest audience would be impressionable adolescents. One can only hope that it did not actually affect anybody in this way.
Finally a bizarre thread of the plot. We are told that angels and demons cannot cross into the plane of reality, and that those figures who do are some kind of half-breed. Are we thus to understand that the angel Gabriel (Tilda Swinton) and the demon Balthazar (Gavin Rossdale) portrayed here are the result of inter-world breeding between humans on our plane and pure-bred angels or demons from the plane of heaven and hell? Yet that is impossible because obviously living humans cannot meet pure-bred angels or demons until after death, and then those humans are souls in the bliss of heaven or the everlasting torture of hell. The whole idea is a nonsense. Let's hope all members of all audiences realized that the ideas in this story are merely a load of macabre garbage masquerading as mysticism.
Of course, to the rational empiricist mind, all mysticism is merely macabre mumbo-jumbo and superstition, concocted to frighten and control the gullible. Some reviewers who refer to the serious side of the movie appear to buy this religious theology; certainly without it the movie is just a rather boring tale with a few very brief flashy monster bits. I think my lasting impression of it will just be how very ghastly, horrible, are the parts of the city of Los Angeles in which most of the earthly scenes in this movie are set.