Reviewed by Peter Veugelaers © 2005
- Television is not that bad, ah?

 Poor John Constantine. The running gag is really quite funny if it weren’t also played as serious: the title character is a smoking addict condemned to a life of continual coughing while working his way into God’s good graces as an exorcist to recompense for a mortal sin. The gag links smoking is dangerous for your health with Constantine’s fear-inducing foreboding spiritual death and religious torment. Shots of billboards with gospel radio station slogan k-love, and one asking, got faith, are deliberately placed and meant to be ironic, but are either religiously cynical or theologically meaningful. Perhaps they just mean with a lot of love and faith in ourselves we should take up chewing gum and give up on smoking, Constantine’s subliminal coup d’etat.

 The movie bandies with abandon Roman Catholic and supernatural jargon rendered meaningless. Kenau Reeves laid back interpretation of the title character will humour some and grow on others, but for mustering a religious conundrum about Constantine’s private hell, Reeves is hard to take seriously.

 A grown up version of Haley Joel Osment’s “I see dead people” character from The Sixth Sense Constantine’s gift is in seeing the underbelly world of demons and angels, acquired in childhood, a scenario lifted from The Matrix.

 Constantine knows something is afoul when the demons (and they are mostly demons here) manifest in the physical world, breaking a pact between God and the Devil. “They can only influence”, John says about Satan’s messengers, but cannot interfere. For typical Hollywood movie over indulgence it is better if they interfere – as they do.

 A complaint I have about today’s horror movies is the rabid sensationalism of style (read: The Ring, Saw, The Grudge). The over the top exorcism at the beginning of Constantine and subsequent scenes owes much to The Exorcist but Constantine has none of that movie’s craftsmanship.

 The style of Constantine is extremely important over less important elements (at least in this movie) such as coherence, plot and storyline.

 Of the actors, Tilda Swinton as the angel Gabriel is most fun in two scenes. Her playfulness is welcome in a swirl of bleak special effects excess including red filtered visions of desert and wind stormed Hades, inhabited by the ghoulish, and which is channelled by Constantine, shots of demon infested abdomens (reminiscent of Alien), and smatterings of brain dead slow motion glass splattering at a Catholic hospital where goings on are anything but normal and bound to humour those disillusioned with the religion.

 With its unattractive demented images of torment this might be saying we should avoid hell at all costs, but it is dodgy Bible teaching at best cooked up by Hollywood script doctoring. The answer for Constantine is in the nuances and classical structure of the Hollywood script, not the redemptive themes found in the Bible.

 One hour through the narrative changes tone with an intended emotional resonance but is a drawn-out last hour. By then there is nothing to believe in: a macabre, confusing, twisted, dark and contrived execution of a private hell gone astray. If it is a movie about what smoking does to your lungs, it’s bound to put smokers off for a day or so.