Hand Coding

Full disclosure: Grace Hill Media offered bloggers a free screening pass in exchange for writing an entry about Contantine; I participated in that offer.

You know that feeling you get after suddenly waking up in a movie theater after having dozed off? You’re thinking “What�s going on?” and “What just happened there?”. Yeah, that’s how I felt the entire time as I watched Constantine. Except that I was wide awake the whole time. And that mostly summarizes the screening for Constantine which I went to last night.

Other than the trailer for it preceding In Good Company, I hadn’t heard much about it — the trailer featured a heroic Keanu Reeves in a black & white suit sporting a gun, with plenty of demons and ominous dialog about heaven and hell. How bad could it be? And, the movie started off on the right foot — the WB logo faded in and slowly crumbled into the breeze as an off-screen wind blew in. Unfortunately — and I mean this unsarcastically — the movie went downhill from there.

[Very minor oh-that’s-cool spoiler in this paragraph.] Sure, it had its high points. I mean, one of the early scenes featured a demon-possessed worker who strolls into a road, unaware of the oncoming traffic. He ends up walking right into the path of a car which is unable to stop in time — and the worker remains standing like an immovable force while the car buckles around him.

So, the movie had its cool moments, but I had no idea what was going on. The plot goes something like this: Keanu Reeves plays John Constantine, a man who helps “keep the balance” between the demons of hell and life on earth. And, there’s this woman who jumps to her death. And, there’s another woman that’s a detective. Oh, and Satan and God have a pact that demons must remain in hell but that each of them can sometimes influence the minds of humans. Let me put it this way: Constantine’s plot could form the basis for a new Chewbacca Defense.

It’s not uncommon for directors to have reoccurring signature elements which they incorporate across several works. For instance, James Cameron likes to show feet trampling things and his movies often involve nuclear war. Well, a little IMDB checking reveals that Francis Lawrence directed Constantine. And, as this was his first foray into movie directing, I couldn’t make direct comparisons across a stretch of movies. But, I did notice several themes which kept coming up. To be fair, though, they were more like fetishes at the level with which Lawrence was marinating the audience in these elements:

• Smoking — Yeah, John Constantine smokes and, to Lawrence’s credit, this didn't automatically make him a bad guy. But his cigarettes and Zippo-style lighter just about made enough appearances to warrant an entry in the closing credits.

• Water & Fluids — For some reason, whether it’s blood pooling or water hurling into the air, this guy loves fluids. I mean, had he toned it down, it could have been a theme worthy of a snide remark in the director’s commentary, but it just left me thinking, “What, more fluids?”

• Bugs — Sure, bugs are gross, but that doesn’t mean they should be the go-to device for ready-made creepiness. Having said that, even though the movie is creepy at times, it wasn’t scary to me. But, it had its gross moments. And every gross moment was bug-based. Just a warning — if bugs wig you out, you might want to skip this one.

This movie may sounds pretty bad so far, but there’s yet another draining feature: the kid sidekick. Sidekicks rarely work well in movies (though I’ll acknowledge that there are a few exceptions). And, kid sidekicks are almost always a bad idea. Granted, the kid isn’t some youngster, but he isn’t old enough to drink, either. And, as you might expect, he does little more than act as a sounding board for John Constantine’s one-liners and provide some comic relief every now and then.

Maybe the script just needed another rewrite. Or maybe some would-be “oh, I get it now” scene got left on the cutting-room floor. Either way, I’d skip this one. It’s not boring — I’ll give it that — but I just couldn’t follow what was going on. Then again, it might be salvagable as a rental if supplemented with gratuitous use of the fast-forward button.