Constantine (2005)

Film #344

Constantine (2005)

So why haven't I ever heard of this movie? I'm saying this because it has a pretty big budget..and managed to earn over a hundred thousand...which means the marketing must have been quite good. Coming into this movie I had no idea of what it was other then the fact that it was probably about Keanu Reeves beating the shit out of some demons, trying to save the world...as it shows on the cover of the DVD. So I thought it looked like a fun watch. and like I thought earlier, the movie ended up being exactly what I thought it would be about with an extra story and some spiritual themes thrown in to keep the audience entertained for it's running time of around 2 hours. The reviews seem to be pretty darn mixed to negative towards the flick by professional movie critics but I personally am going to have to say I disagree...I thought it was pretty darn cool.

The plot is about an ordinary man named Constantine, with the amazing but also sickening gift of being able to see the "evil" and "good" spirits of the world, has to stop the certain evils from causing mass destruction of the world alongside a couple of his other friends. The plot obviously makes you understand that this is some sort of comic book film and so I began to expect some good old stupid fun but the movie is actually..quite horrific. Not horrific enough to make me have nightmares but it keeps a light horrific tone all throughout. The visuals are good mainly the parts where the character's witness Hell as it looks pretty terrifying..but the designs for the demons reminded me of a film that came out afterwards called  "I am Legend"....The films plot reminds me of the plot of "Watchmen" and some of the characters, such as Constantine were also similar to characters from Watchmen. In terms of acting, I thought mostly everyone was solid but Keanu Reeves gave a very...weird performance. I mean at first he was giving off the impression of a "Clint Eastwood" wannabe then he reminded me of Rorschach (Watchmen,2009) but he also gave the impression that he is self parodying himself...I don't know...it was weird. I liked his performance as he was pretty bad ass but there was something that was just...odd about it...I don't know...hmm...A lot of the "style" of the film also reminded me of Snyder's style as there was a lot of "slow motion" scenes and  great action scenes,etc. The screenplay, on the other hand was rather mediocre and the last quarter was pretty bad. I was kind of disappointed...it definitely seemed like the writer was out of ideas and added in what ever stupid ideas came to his head. The direction was decent and overall managed to have me entertained up to the horrible last quarter. I think the biggest flaw was that the film lacked character development..a lot of it was just thrown in or said through a character in minimal time and it's themes of an "uncaring God" and much that was related to the devil" were not much dug into well enough..unlike the other film that it reminded me of "Watchmen" which I thought dug quite well into it's themes.

Overall, it was an entertaining spiritual comic book adaptation that didn't bore and had me satisfied up to it's lame last quarter. Could have been better though...

6/10



-Alexson Philipiah