Directed by Francis Lawrence
Important Lessons Learned from Constantine:
1. Believe in the devil. After all, he believes in you (and looks smashing in a white suit).
2. God is just a kid with an ant farm.
3. To properly channel the forces of evil, you need a pan of water and a friendly cat. Or, you can just wander over to your local Watering Hole of the Damned and use their special Gateway to Hell chair.
4. You can recognize an angel by their white, Bohemian/Hippie clothes.
5. In addition to certain aliens, demons also have a tendency to explode out of people's torsos.
6. Smoking may cause lung cancer, emphysema and may complicate pregnancy.
7. Hell's language of choice is Latin.
8. Even with terminal lung cancer, it is still possible to sprint after and beat the crap out of legions of hellspawn.
9. Catholicism was way cooler before Vatican II (ask a Catholic).
10. DO NOT consume a giant cup of Cherry Coke before watching Constantine. There are water bottles, swimming pools, bath tubs, sprinklers, sinks and rainstorms everywhere in this movie. It's torture, I tell ya.
The "Staring Contest" is a little-known exorcism technique.
But it's fun, despite it all. Even though Keanu Reeves can't act his way out of a paper bag (but we all know that), and even though Constantine is nothing more than a collection of visually stunning effects shots ripped out of better movies. Seriously. The best way to enjoy this movie is to NOT have seen The Exorcist, Blade, Hellboy, Spawn, The Matrix, or The Mummy, to name the more obvious influences. There's nothing original here, and the incredibly convoluted and contrived story feels tacked on, resolving things in two seconds that took two hours to establish. Almost as though the producers were so entertained with the action sequences that they didn't realize until the end that they had no story ("Quick, stick an ending on this thing!"). This is fairly typical of action movies, but Constantine is one of the few actually slick enough to keep you from noticing that. Until someone happens to ask you what the movie was actually about.
"Uh, well, there's this guy named John Constantine (Keanu Reeves) who sees demons and shoots them with a big crucifix-gun to try and bargain his way out of hell because he tried to commit suicide, and he's got terminal cancer and some kind of arrangement with archangel Gabriel, then there's this woman Angela (Rachel Weisz) who also sees demons and had a sister who committed suicide, except she doesn't think it was actually suicide and instead has something to do with demons, and there's this divine spear on the loose that can unleash Hell on Earth, and..."
...And ultimately it doesn't matter whether you can follow the plot or not, cuz eventually everything leads to visuals of Heaven and Hell, smashed up rooms and demon butt-kicking, which are all handled with the flair and attention that the story obviously was not.
"Give us the precioussss! We neeedss the preciousss!"
Constantine stands out also for its sheer volume of wacky mythology. Does Christianity only make for interesting subject material when you use the Medieval, Latin-spouting version of Catholicism and dress it up in absurdly complicated paganistic rituals and enough relics to fill St. Peter's Basilica? For an action movie, well, yes. But the religious stuff is just a plot device, so there's no sense in getting offended at its gross misuse.
The CGI is almost perfectly rendered, everyone besides Keanu puts in a decent performance (especially the woefully underused Peter Stormare as Lucifer) and, for the most part, the script isn't that bad (most of the klunkers come from Keanu, but his high-school-play delivery makes everything he says sound awkward). Add it all up and you get a flick that you'll enjoy for the two hours or so that it's on the screen, but that really won't impress you quite as much once it's over.
