There are no spoil­ers in this review.

Emmanuel Vivier from Cread­rive / Culture-Buzz asked whether I’d like to review a movie and a cou­ple of days later I received the collector’s edi­tion DVD of Con­stan­tine — the movie:

Based on the DC Comics/Vertigo Hell­blazer graphic nov­els and writ­ten by
Kevin Brod­bin and Frank Cap­pello, Con­stan­tine tells the story of John
Con­stan­tine (Keanu Reeves [see note]), a man who has lit­er­ally been to hell and
back. When he teams up with skep­ti­cal police­woman Angela Dod­son (Rachel
Weisz) to solve the mys­te­ri­ous sui­cide of her twin sis­ter, their
inves­ti­ga­tion takes them through the world of demons and angels that
exists just beneath the land­scape of con­tem­po­rary Los Ange­les. Caught
in a cat­a­strophic series of oth­er­worldly events, the two become
inex­tri­ca­bly involved and seek to find their own peace at what­ever cost.

Did I like it?

Yes, and I’ve seen it twice. The film starts off strongly with some chill­ing scenes that make you dig into your seat and pre­pare for what seems to be a good hor­ror movie. The spe­cial effects are great and the bonus DVD is great at explain­ing how the movie was made (the bonus is as inter­est­ing as the movie). Some parts of the movie are indeed remark­able, includ­ing the vision of a par­al­lel hell coex­ist­ing as an invis­i­ble layer on Earth, inhab­ited by brain­less (and soul-less) demons. There’s lots of orig­i­nal mate­r­ial and you get the sense that the direc­tors had a vision when mak­ing this film, so Con­stan­tine is worth see­ing and I’m glad to have it in my col­lec­tion. I’ll be see­ing it again, if only for some good scenes.

How­ever, the movie falls short of being a favorite of mine. After the strong start, the movie slowly becomes a spe­cial effects extrav­a­ganza, to the detri­ment of the good film noir feel. The movie alter­nates between a comic book look and grim real­ism (see here) … whereas stick­ing with either style would have been much bet­ter. Keanu’s act­ing is wooden, his rap­port with Angela lacks ten­sion, and some of the dia­logues are ridicu­lous. It would have been great to have a voice-over, like Deckart on Blade Run­ner, if only to add inter­est to John Con­stan­tine by expos­ing his train of thought. The Angel Gabriel is just plain strange and fails to inspire fear. Over­all, the movie falls in love with itself and goes over­board with the spe­cial effects to the detri­ment of the story. It’s a pity, because there’s ample mate­r­ial here to make a good, cult film-noir.

I haven’t read the Hell­blazer comics but I get the feel­ing that it’s quite a bit dif­fer­ent than the movie and that direct com­par­isons by purists are irrel­e­vant: inspired by the comic book series, the movie stands on its own feet.

How well did the movie do? Here are some num­bers, from Rot­ten Toma­toes:

Note: Hell­blazer fans have crit­i­cized the cast­ing of Keanu
Reeves as John Con­stan­tine, most notably because he bears no
resem­blance to Sting, after whom the comic book char­ac­ter is mod­eled.
On the other hand, Keanu has long bat­tled his own demons, mak­ing him an
appro­pri­ate choice for this film noir. Accord­ing to FemaleFirst.co.uk:

Despite the mete­oric suc­cess of his Hol­ly­wood career, both Keanu’s fam­ily life and love life have been dogged by disaster.The trou­bled star’s ex-convict father, Sam, aban­doned both Keanu and his mother when he was just a few years old. Later, the Reeves fam­ily was again rocked when an argu­ment
between Keanu’s sis­ter, Kim — who has been bat­tling leukaemia — and her
mother over an Eng­lish woman she had taken on as an adop­tive daugh­ter
caused a bit­ter rift.Since then, Keanu has bat­tled deep depres­sion after the heartache of
his daugh­ter being still-born, as well as her mother, Jen­nifer Syme,
being killed in a tragic road acci­dent a year later.

In light of this, Keanu’s some­what expres­sion­less and wooden act­ing
in the movie is sur­pris­ing. He car­ries the movie, of course, but does
it with­out emo­tion and in a monot­one that’s in strik­ing con­trast to the
wild demonic goings-on around him. Ok, so he lives with­out hope, is
unim­pressed by the demons he sees and has develped a cyn­i­cal attitude.In my expe­ri­ence, how­ever, despite their gen­eral stand­off­ish­ness, cyn­i­cal peo­ple tend to engage more emo­tion­ally with those around them than the char­ac­ter Con­stan­tine does.

For a good review of the movie, see here … (with spoilers).