A hot cast who can’t save Constantine
Constantine is worse than Showgirls. You heard me. The only thing worse than an absolute waste of celluloid like Showgirls is a film that pathetically believes in its own hollow brilliance. Constantine lays the intellectual mumbo jumbo on thick with synthetic irony designed to make the audience chuckle and/or ponder heavy moral issues.
Case in point: The chain-smoking antihero John Constantine (Keanu Reeves) brandishes a holy shotgun and unloads a practice shot, blasting his pack of cigarettes to smithereens. As the camera pans over, some of the pieces just happen to land on a tabletop, prominently displaying the Surgeon General’s warning that smoking may cause death. Meanwhile, the badass, gun-toting Constantine walks off in the background.
Even sadder is the film’s wasted potential. Constantine’s rather taut opening scenes are a cruel tease for what ends up an immensely disappointing flick.
The film opens with a vagrant finding the Spear of Destiny (that is, the spear used to kill Christ) buried about 100 miles outside Los Angeles draped in a Nazi flag. Why would the Nazi’s have hidden the artifact near Los Angeles? Perhaps Adolf Hitler misplaced it during one of his frequent vacations to the United States.
But despite this oversight, the first 10 minutes of the film proceed smoothly, with vivid depictions of demons and exorcism and eardrum-rattling scares. Dressed in all black (cough … The Matrix), Reeves’ Constantine strolls onto the scene as the all-business hand of God, excising mischievous devils from a small child in a fashion eerily reminiscent of The Exorcist.
The chilling visual effects only sustain the movie’s overall lack of appeal or action for so long. Though the thought of God and Satan as equally powerful and opposing forces is interesting, Constantine fails to run with this idea. Instead, it provides heroes without a clear-cut opposition — the audience knows who to root for but not who to root against.
There’s a story in this movie somewhere, something about twins Angela and Isabel (both played by Rachel Weisz, Runaway Jury) being the key to bringing Satan’s son into this dimension, but everyone is just waiting for Reeves to start blasting demons Matrix-style.
And that scene comes, oh, about an hour and 40 minutes into the movie. Until then you have Reeves’ wit and endless conversation about the dual nature of creation to sustain you.
While the movie is only intermittently frightening, Reeves’ acting is horrifying. The wooden actor frequently reads his dialogue like he’s ordering fast food, yelling into that little speaker while trying to enunciate each word with little regard for conveying emotion with his face.
Although the film certainly has a few Matrix-y elements, it is not the rip off you expect. Reeves is a hero who wears all black and fights for mankind, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end.
Yet unlike The Matrix, a Star Wars-style, special-effects film that can get away with subpar acting, this film asks for more of surfer-boy Reeves than he can offer. He may want to take a few months off and go to the beach and hang 10 because as Constantine, Reeves is a complete zero.
