Solid and entertaining, but cliché ridden

Rating: 6/10 (2 March 2005)

I went to see this movie last Sunday and my expectations were not too high, so I got what I expected, perhaps even more. "Constantine" is another Keanu Reeves fantasy vehicle, but this time it's about demons and angels and not a parallel world aka The Matrix. It's hard to judge Reeves' acting as it shifts from poor and uninspired to solid and credible all the time. Perhaps the scriptwriter or the director are to blame. The direction really could have been better. The effects are on par with what one can expect from a big blockbuster flick, yet they tend to get overwhelming and exhausting.
Rachel Weisz is undoubtedly the film's strongest point and her performance is excellent and as good as it can be in such a film. Her character is also among the few well-crafted ones in the movie. Djimon Hounsou doesn't make much impact this time and Peter Stormare's cameo as Lucifer is...well, entertaining. Although one can wonder what he's doing in this movie. Tilda Swinton's bizarre incarnation as Gabriel is just weird, hard to comprehend. I'm against all this "womanising" of archangels, it's so absurd and cliché-ish, typical product of the 21st century culture. Like "why can't a woman play Gabriel?" Well...because Gabriel was a male, not some androgynous creature.
The biggest downside with this flick is the inexhaustive arsenal of bad jokes and typical Hollywood clichés which never seem to cease. Constantine's finger to Lucifer in the climax of the film is perhaps the only joke that is tasteful. The exorcism scene in the beginning was very intense and is among the better parts of the movie. All said, this is probably as good as a movie based on a comic can get, so I think it deserves a 6.