Constantine

REVIEW
Imagine Blade-meets-The Exorcist-in-The Matrix and you've got a pretty good sense of the clumsy, cacophonous genre mishmash Constantine, the latest in a seemingly endless series of big-screen adaptations of cult-driven comic books. This one’s based on DC/Vertigo’s Hellblazer and stars Keanu Reeves as John Constantine, a chain-smoking “supernatural detective” who’s literally been to Hell and back. Clad like a lost Reservoir Dog and carrying the weight of the world on his conscience, JC (insert Biblical subtext here — with a jackhammer) skulks around the big bad City of Angels doing the work of the righteous: performing impromptu exorcisms on the recently possessed and vanquishing various demons of the underworld … you know, that sort of thing … all in a vain effort to kiss-ass his way into Heaven. The plot concerns a hostile takeover of existence by the snobbish Balthazar (rocker Gavin Rossdale of Bush), which has something to do with the possession and suspected suicide of a beautiful psychic (Rachel Weisz) and the investigatory intervention of her twin sister (also Weisz). The film’s stylized glimpses of Hell suggest a jagged, nuked-out scrapheap of junked cars guarded by snarly doglike creatures with exposed brains (all of it over-brushed with digital smudge and flame effects). Despite a flippant finale that introduces a deliriously goofy Peter Stormare as Satan (who out-hams Al Pacino’s diabolical turn in Devil’s Advocate), the sullen Constantine commits the cardinal sin of self-seriousness. It’s never as much fun as the filmmakers have calculated it should be.