"That's a nice-a donut."

Friday, September 02, 2005

Constantine (2005)

It had to happen sooner or later. With the glut of comic book-based movies in the last few years (since the successes of X-Men and Spider-man), you had to figure that sooner or later the studios would begin to run out of ideas for the more popular superhero books and would gravitate towards a few of the less mainstream characters. And with that we get Constantine, based on the DC Comics book Hellblazer from the Vertigo imprint.

John Constantine (Keanu Reeves) is a paranormal investigator who was born with a gift. He deals with the occult, demonology, and exorcisms, and is somehow able to see and understand supernatural beings. For instance, he believes that long ago God and the Devil made a bet concerning good and evil and now angels, demons, and half-breeds walk the Earth, with the balance between good and evil up for grabs. Now there has been an increase in supernatural activity recently, like Constantine excising a "soldier demon" out of a young girl.

Enter Angela (Rachel Weisz), a police detective who is grieving over the death of her twin sister Isabel. She jumped off the roof at a mental hospital in which she was a patient, in an apparent suicide, but Angela is convinced that she was somehow murdered since her sister would never do anything like that. Angela and Constantine team up to get to the bottom of the mystery and try to find their place in the order of things.

The movie is sure to draw the inevitable comparison to another little film starring Reeves, The Matrix. Both are effects-heavy films that take themselves too seriously, in out-of-this-world places where many things are not what they seem. Like The Matrix, Constantine also features quite a bit of existential babble ("God's a kid with an ant farm; he's not planning anything"), and both films also share the style of using greenish hues in a number of scenes (though I'm not sure what the color symbolizes or is intended to represent, other than just looking nice). Continuing with the comparison, Reeves turns in this usual performance. That is to say that is he is stone-faced, emotionless, and jaded. But in this role those traits mostly do him well, as a man who is unlike anyone else and knows things that so many others do not. The effects are small, but fancy, and the set designs are very interesting. Thou a few of the camera angles are quite odd.

But things get bogged down a bit in the final act. Whereas the movie up until then was intriguing by way of being rather mysterious and a fairly novel idea, some of the mystery was now gone and, well, the emperor didn't have as many clothes as it should have. As with Angela in the movie who is having trouble coming to terms with what may have happened to her sister, it takes a real leap of faith to get past some of the logic and plot devices. And a plotline about the Spear of Destiny (the weapon that killed Jesus, which has been found after being lost for many years) is downplayed and almost forgotten along the way. Ultimately the movie is more style than substance.

Constantine, from music video director turned first-time filmmaker Francis Lawrence, is not nearly as groundbreaking or simply as fun as The Matrix. But it manages to hold its own in the increasingly overloaded genre of comic book movies. What's next, a movie based on Howard the Duck? Never mind.

The Verdict: C.

Michael Bentley 1:40 PM

"That's a nice-a donut."

Friday, September 02, 2005

Archives