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Let's not dwell on the question of why Keanu Reeves would choose to play the role of a loner set out to save the world from an unknown and unseen alternate world of evil, immediately following his Matrix trilogy, where he played a loner set out to save the world...you know the rest. Instead, let's look at Constantine (based on DC/Vertigo Comics Hellblazer series) from a fresh vantage point - okay, so we still don't get much, do we?. John Constantine (the initials J.C. should not be lost on anyone) is a seemingly doomed character who may or may not be partly divine...wait a minute, am I talking about The Matrix again? - Let's get off that subject and move on.
Reeves, in complete rulebook fashion for the modern anti-hero, is a chain-smoking, pissed off rebel, who seems to be helping people with a nothing-better-to-do attitude. Actually he helps people in order to be let into Heaven (the lapsed Catholic attempted suicide as a teenager and caught a glimpse of Hell in the doing) - if he does enough good, will God forgive his sins? Not that Constantine delves very deep into the spiritual well that it attempts to gulp buckets from - suspiciously a lot like the pseudo-christian folklorish storytelling of The Matrix (a film, the original at least, that should have been much better than it was) - but I said I wouldn't talk about those films anymore.
No worse or no better than any one of your atypical Hollywoood horror/action pics (Van Helsing's equally ludicrous little brother?). Not a bad film, just typical (not even as originally morose as the comic), full of the sexy but tough damsel-in-distress, the funny but ultimately doomed sidekick, the broken down mentor, the smooth sauve villian (played with a certain glee by rock star Gavin Rossdale) and, of course the atypical happy ending (I'm sure I spoiled nobodys expectations with that "spoiler"). The two shining points in the film are the slyly sexy androgynous Tilda Swinton as the Archangel Gabriel and Peter Storemare who plays Lucifer as some sort of cross-hybrid of Hannibal Lector and Peter Allen. Otherwise, Constantine plays out as just another in a long long ever-so-long line of unchallenging, audience pandering, easy-on-the-eyes (and brain) one-liner motion pictures (hmm, like The Matrix maybe - there I did it again). [02/21/05]
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