constantine

THE FLICK: Listing a film’s inspirations seems criminally unfair at this juncture of cinematic history. Post-modernism has evolved into an entirely new movement of creative borrowing, lifting and sometimes outright thievery to become a capitalistic collage of ideas so cluttered no one can really lay claim to much original thought. It’s what you do with those borrowed elements that is the measure of most films’ success. And Constantine, although a failure on the grand scale of things, has moments that break through the surface of mediocrity with stunning clarity. Based on the Hellblazer comic series, Keanu Reeves portrays (rather uncomfortably) the demonic detective John Constantine, cursed to witness the dark forces at work amongst us, but blessed with the ability to do something about it. His character is a cynical, defeated, mess of a man, quoting tough-guy dialogue with an ever-present cigarette dangling from his lower lip. The fact that he’s dying of lung cancer is just another inconvenience; about on par with the possessed spirits he deports back to the netherworld to try and earn his way back into heaven. It doesn’t take a degree in casting to know Keanu Reeves is all wrong for the part. The suit drapes around his scarecrow frame quite convincingly, but when he opens his mouth to mutter lines written in the dangerous style of Raymond Chandler – fused with the arcane knowledge of H.P. Lovecraft – he’s well out of his acting range. Rachel Weisz, as his love interest-cum-psychic partner, delivers a much more natural performance that actually has the side-effect of making Reeve’s look worse. The high points of Constantine are almost purely directorial. While Francis Lawrence is comfortable with his special effects (an essential skill for any new-age Hollywood director, but certainly not a given) he also has an eye for abstract framing and a feel for dramatic foreboding. The first 15 minutes of Constantine are as good as any genre work released in the last 10 years, abundantly enhanced with CG but spectacularly staged. And ?’s initiation into the spirit world courtesy of an antique bathtub is the kind of scene that works without any special effects at all. Still, it’s not enough to support the weight of all the plot devices cobbled from superior (and often inferior) films. The war between angels and demons might have its roots in some obscure Biblical passages, but Gregory Widen’s The Prophecy cast the biggest shadow over Constantine’s story of a heavenly game of chess between celestial beings who should be above such nonsense.