Release Date: February 18, 2005
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz, Djimon Hounsou, Tilda Swinton, Peter Stormare
Directed by: Francis Lawrence
Written by: Kevin Brodbin, Frank Cappello
Distributed by: Warner Brothers
MPAA Rating: R (violence, demonic images)
Having starred in what turned out to be one of the biggest (and, ultimately, according to conventional wisdom, disappointing) sci-fi franchises in the history of the movies, the actors from the Matrix films don’t seem to be in any hurry to distance themselves from it, as though by playing roughly the same characters in other, similarly-themed movies, they can have a kind of cinematic after-party, where fans get to go on swallowing the vaguely intellectual psycho/socio/political/religious gobbledygook that was The Matrix’s greatest facet as well as the source of its sequels’ inevitable downfall.
The most blatant example, thus far, is Constantine, a noirish fantasy actioner directed by Francis Lawrence from a script by Kevin Brodbin and Frank Cappello that was based on the Hellblazer line of DC Comics. In it, Keanu Reeves plays the title character, John Constantine, who is an exorcist and paranormal investigator -- think of him as a chain-smoking Ghostbuster without all the clunky equipment -- who, through a variety of unusual circumstances (then again, there’s not much that isn’t unusual in Constantine), knows that when he dies, he will go to Hell. In order to avoid damnation, he has set himself on a mission to kill as many demons on Earth as possible, in the hopes of winning his way back into Heaven. Thus Reeves is once again playing an interloper in a conflict of epic, potentially world-shattering proportions, with equal ties to both sides. The only difference between the plot here and the plot in The Matrix is that Constantine forgoes almost all symbolism; it is unashamedly literal.
There are, of course, some other subplots to be had: Rachel Weisz plays a police detective named Isabel Dodson whose sister commits suicide near the beginning of the picture; Isabel also has an uncanny ability to know when and where crimes will be committed (she sees them in her dreams), which, understandably, has her a little out of sorts. She runs into Constantine almost by chance, and the two of them start working together because the script says they have to be love interests, for one reason, and also because Isabel’s sister’s suicide may have something to do with another subplot involving a relic called the Spear of Destiny and recent attempts by the demons of Hell to come to Earth en masse. So: Once more, the battle between good and evil has reached its climactic stages, Reeves is caught in the middle and probably the only one who can save good from certain destruction by evil, and he has a capable, dark-haired beauty of an actress to play his combination sidekick/love interest.
What neither The Matrix nor Constantine ever gets around to explaining, however, is why Reeves, perhaps the most un-charismatic A-list actor around, gets trusted to anchor franchises like this. His costars reliably outshine him -- in this film, Tilda Swinton plays the archangel Gabriel in a few scenes, and Peter Stormare turns up as Satan in a wonderful pseudo-cameo at the very end; both do much more with much less than Reeves ever could -- and his trademark stoicism seems to be not so much the product of acting school or experience as it is the product of chemical substances. Slight of build and without the bellowing timbre of a Vin Diesel or The Rock or, back in the day, Arnold Schwarzenegger (who, perhaps not coincidentally, also did one of these good-and-evil pictures in 1999, called End of Days), he is not the most obvious choice for action heroism. And yet here he is, sleepwalking his way through another Heaven-versus-Hell wonkfest, when the picture could probably use someone willing to fill up the screen, or at least take a little more initiative in that direction.
But with Reeves in the picture, Constantine loses a little credibility; it suddenly becomes more about the spectacle and special effects than it does about the production design (which is good, if completely reminiscent of The Matrix as well) or the plot or the dialogue (which, admittedly, is not that good, but then neither was that of Matrix). This is true even when Reeves has talented actors like Weisz, Swinton, Stormare, and Djimon Hounsou (who plays a kind of professional colleague to Constantine named Midnite) to buttress him, because Reeves’s career has become a shrine to buttressing; it’s more or less accepted in Hollywood and among moviegoers that Reeves’s “whoa” factor needs to be offset by actors who will probe at least one layer beneath the surface of their cardboard cutout characters. This they do, to some degree, but unfortunately for Constantine, it doesn’t have the budget or the running length to compete with the Matrix franchise’s spectacle and special effects, which means that it will come up on the short end of any comparison.
Constantine, however, doesn’t seem to have been designed with mass consumption in mind, though its distributor, Warner Brothers, probably wouldn’t mind. Rather, it feels planned to cater to whatever audiences are still enduring Matrix withdrawal. Even though the story is based on a series of comic books that predated The Matrix, it feels like a repackaged version of the same story, only less costly and more literal, like buying generic painkillers or off-brand cigarettes instead of Tylenol or Marlboros -- though considering the amount of physical punishment and nicotine that John Constantine goes through in this film, I probably shouldn’t have expected anything different.
-- Craig Roush (craigroush@hotmail.com)