Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on February 18, 2005, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
One is not supposed to think about other movies while watching a film, but I couldn’t help recalling Alien3 while seeing Constantine. More to the point, I flashed back to the feeling I got from that sequel, that here was the work of a director who would clearly be going places once he became attached to the right project. Like Alien3’s David Fincher, Constantine director Francis Lawrence is a music-video veteran making his feature debut, and he’s clearly got the right sensibilities to tell a dark story instead of just making the surfaces look good. Yet story is what’s lacking in Constantine, or at least a coherent or involving one.
The opening titles advise us that an ancient relic called the Spear of Destiny can grant world domination to whoever holds it, and suggest that really bad stuff will happen should it be unearthed. Sure enough, it’s discovered in Mexico, results in a couple of cool FX setpieces and then…pretty much disappears from the film until the very end. The focus of Kevin Brodbin and Frank Cappello’s script is, of course, John Constantine (Keanu Reeves), the hero of DC/Vertigo’s Hellblazer comics who is here presented as a weary slayer of demons, a man trying to effect his own salvation by dispatching supernatural beings that have entered our plane. He’s approached by a detective, Angela Dodson (Rachel Weisz), whose twin sister has committed suicide and who refuses to believe her sibling would have taken her own life. Needless to say, there are occult forces involved that draw the two into a plot by greater powers to overwhelm our world.
If only the particulars of that plot, and the motivations of those involved, were clearer. Instead, Constantine feels like a movie that requires its own Cliffs Notes, or at least a solid familiarity with the source material. Part of the problem is that the many supporting humans, angels and devils are given short shrift in favor of the emphasis on Constantine, and that he himself doesn’t cut as compelling a character as he should. Having no familiarity with the comics, I can’t say how closely Constantine’s onscreen persona hews to his four-color origins, but based solely on the movie’s incarnation, Reeves simply seems miscast. He does capably enact the beaten-down, world-weary surface of the persona, but his performance is too opaque to make Constantine’s inner torment palpable to the audience. Reeves has always been at his best when playing uncomplicated people dealing with extreme external challenges; he’s less convincing when a role calls for expression of a complicated interior life, which is why he fared better in the first Matrix than in its sequels. In Constantine, he suggests a man consumed with fatalism and cynicism without allowing the viewer to actually feel it.
Weisz picks up some of the slack with a compelling turn as Angela, whose zeal to know the truth is the flip side of Constantine’s very reluctant heroism. The supporting cast is good on paper, but the parts are too brief to make much of an impression. Shia La Beouf, as a cabbie who shuttles Constantine around on his demon-hunting missions, doesn’t get much to do beyond contributing wisecracking-sidekick schtick, Djimon Hounsou is similarly underused as a nightclub owner and expert in both light and dark magic and Peter Stormare as Lucifer, when he finally shows up toward the movie’s end, has been encouraged to camp it up when a serious menace might have lent the climax a little more emotional weight. Most criminally underused is the marvelous Tilda Swinton, who has a truly regal yet subtly playful presence as the angel Gabriel, but only gets one scene before her own appearance in the final showdown.
By the time that confrontation arrives, it still hasn’t been made clear exactly what’s at stake for either the principals or the world in general, and though there are a few briefly jolting moments, the overall emotional involvement is lacking. On the other hand, it’s something of a relief that Lawrence has resisted the temptation to overamp things with hyperactive camerawork and overcutting; for all the flashy CGI trips to hell and demon assaults, there’s a refreshingly subdued quality to quite a bit of Constantine. (I especially liked how he shoots a bit involving Constantine and a spider in one unbroken take, as if the arachnid had accidentally wandered into the frame and Reeves decided to just go with it.) The director also creates a visual and aural environment that’s more consistent than the storytelling, marshalling fine cinematography by Philippe Rousselot, production design by Naomi Shohan and music by Brian Tyler and Klaus Badelt into a vision that suggests a real filmmaker at work. While I can’t recommend his first feature, I’d wager that he’s got a Se7en in him yet.
