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Please, deliver us from 'Constantine'
Keanu Reeves
David James/Warner Bros. Pictures
Director: Francis Lawrence
Stars: Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz, Shia LeBeouf
MPAA rating: R for violence and demonic images
It's an exceptionally affirmative work.
"Constantine" is an idiotic film that rips off "The Exorcist" while being ostentatiously ignorant, blasphemous and tasteless.
But then, it's based on characters from graphic novels including "Hellblazer," which isn't the sort of source you'd look to for a grasp of God, Satan or the mortality of the lives lived in between.
John Constantine (Keanu Reeves) is a secular exorcist who has smoked himself into a terminal stage of lung cancer. That's supposed to give him dramatic gravity.
Although he is essentially faithless, except as his prospective condemnation to hell serves the plot, he hopes to pick up heavenly points by helping cop Angela Dodson (Rachel Weisz) figure out why her sister Isabel (also Weisz) plunged suicidally from the roof of a Catholic hospital.
It seems Satan (Peter Stormare) has broken his pact with God -- again, please? -- and is populating the earth with half-breed demons who are "crossing over." Let the yawning begin.
The alcoholic Father Hennessy (Pruitt Taylor Vince) acts as though he's auditioning for the role of poor Renfield in "Dracula."
Cabbie-sidekick Chas (Shia LeBeouf) thinks Constantine is cool.
The witch doctor Midnite (Djimon Hounsou) runs a voodoo nightclub.
Most offensive is the trotting out of the angel Gabriel (Tilda Swinton), a half-breed whose entire depiction is designed to be as annoyingly revisionist as possible.
The screenplay is by Kevin Brodbin and Frank Cappello and the direction by music video maker Francis Lawrence, all of whom need to mature before they next reduce the Old and New Testaments to salad dressing on bad plotting.
