Why this movie condemned itself to hell

Rating: Null/10 (19 July 2005)

Okay, so here's my typically film-student critique of this movie. I'm not going to just bash it without giving good examples and saying what I would've done to change it if only I'd written the damned screenplay.
Problem # 1: Tone. It's a movie about Heaven and Hell and demons on earth and the apocalypse. A good director and writer could've really done this movie justice by making it darker, excluding the cute, witty one liners and quirks and going for the R-rated brutality of its theme. I don't totally blame the director for this: there were some interesting moments I give him credit for and some great mise-en-scene choices (devil in a white suit--classic); a little too much CGI for my taste and not enough left to the imagination, but I think he did his best, to no avail. My point is, a perfectly good excuse to use the darker, more serious tone that would've suited this concept was squandered, and my two hours were bruised because of it.
Problem #2 (a more obvious problem): wasted time on too many characters and repeated actions. This movie could've saved precious time by combining characters--thereby allowing us to understand and get to know them better--and by not having 25 trips to hell and 7 exorcisms (don't say "Nuh uh"--I'm exaggerating). Here's what I mean by combining characters: the priest, the bowling alley guy and the annoying sidekick all could've been made into one character, the "sidekick/researcher" character who does all the things these three do for the plot without weighing it down with three separate characters. Also, Balthazar and Gabriel could've been combined to form a singular "tangible threat" character; Gabriel could've easily done all the things Balthazar did without having to splinter into two separate characters. Why wasn't this done to prevent the chaos of too many meaningless flat characters with five-minute parts and deaths that came before you could even give a crap about them? Because of Problem # 3...
Which is this: Constantine shouldn't have been an adaptation of the comic. It should've been based on the comic. What's the difference? It's the difference between O Brother Where Art Thou (a film based on Homer's Odyssey) and Troy (a poor adaptation of Homer's Iliad). A film based on a book or comic has more creative freedom to know which characters or events do or don't work for the film, to make changes, to deviate. The screenwriter made the mistake of thinking he had to adapt this comic to film, and thereby assuming that this meant he had to squeeze an entire comic book series and all its coolest characters into a 2-hour frame, necessity and plot be damned.
That said, I'm not totally mad at this movie. Keanu gave one of his biggest efforts at acting ever (some will snort that that isn't saying much). Plus, every time I see Djimon Honsou smile I have this Pavlovian response that makes me say "I like him". And Peter Stormare made the most original devil I've seen in a while, with his wonderfully creepy mannerisms and discomfiting presence (funny thing: the first time I saw him in Fargo in a scene after he kills a cop, I said "That man is the devil--in a real good way"). So to wrap it up, here's my solution: some writers need a license to adapt comic books. Then maybe we'd have more Sin City's and Crow's and less Constantine's.