movie review - Constantine
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
This is a Christian-themed action flick with Keanu Reaves and Rachel Weisz. I rented it looking for something straightforward and non-challenging for my severely jetlagged brain, but it was actually considerably better than I was expecting. As the first movie I'd seen in six weeks, this came as a nice surprise.
It's a movie based on the Hellblazer comic books, featuring a main character who can see the angels and deamons that move among us. His is a tragic tale. The visions he saw as a child - and the terror they caused him - led to his parents sending him to a loonie bin, where he was routinely treated to the full gamut of modern medical excess. Things got so bad that he killed himself.
And went to hell.
He was resuscitated and brought back, but the damage was done. As a suicide, he's bound to spend eternity in hell.
But having had a taste, he's working on doing nothing but escaping that fate, and he spends his time fighting deamons in hopes of saving up enough good will (as it were) to avoid hell.
By the movie's outset, he's banished an lifetime's worth of deamons, but it hasn't worked. He's still hellbound, and when he learns that he's dying of cancer, he starts to get desperate.
That's when a cop with a psychic knack and a sister's death to resolve comes into his life. Their stories become slowly intertwined and along the way they learn of a consipiracy of rebellious factions of angels and deamons to take over the Earth.
The plot at this point becomes highly reminiscent of the Christopher Walken movie Prophecy, and that's all I'll say.
It's a stylish flick and prone to certain camera angles and pauses but thankfully not in the excessive Matrix style with which Reeves is associated. The direction is consistent and the story zips along without either dragging or unnecessary exposition. It even remains fairly true to what I remember of the comic books (Constantine's character is a bitter burnout, his friends all pay the price for his war with Hell, etc).
Recommended.