Movie Review

Directed by Francis Lawrence

Warner Brothers Pictures

It’s a story as old as creation or, if you prefer, evolution: human beings love playing God. And our fellow mere mortals love taking us to task for it. Certainly Keanu Reeves, who plays the title role in the new action/fantasy movie Constantine, is accustomed to accusations of a messianic complex. In The Matrix, Reeves’ character Neo fights to rescue humanity from its unwitting enslavement to parasitic forms of artificial intelligence. Now Reeves returns with a new name but suspiciously similar storyline and character: laconic loner John Constantine fights an epic battle of good-versus-evil while brooding at the fringe of American urban society.

Like the traditional epic hero, John Constantine’s problems arise from both his own character flaws and the particularly grueling fate allotted him. Since childhood, he has been able to recognize the ghoulish “half-breeds” who, as hybrid demon-human creatures, can cross the border between heaven and hell and upset “the balance” between God and Satan’s bid for human souls. Young Constantine’s terrifying visions classify him as a psychotic, and as the result of the trauma of his visions and equally horrific “therapy,” he commits suicide.

This mortal sin condemns him to hell, but he manages to survive and returns to earth. Though he’s been given a second chance at life, he can’t seem to ditch his self-destructive bent, courting danger as a freelance demon-hunter and smoking himself to lung cancer. Now, facing death a second time, he agrees to help the lovely but pushy detective Angie unravel her sister’s suicide.

I fear over-intellectualizing a Hollywood project that likely spent far more time and money on fight scenes than philosophical inquiry, but Constantine ups the ante in the messianic-action genre by grotesquely overloading the film with hijacked symbolism and lexicon from established religion. In a society that is obsessed with both political correctness and pushing the envelope, Constantine treads dangerous ground with its less-than-reverent appropriation of Roman Catholic rites and faith.

The story begins with the rediscovery of the “Spear of Destiny,” presumably the lance that pierced Jesus’ side during his crucifixion, here a mystical talisman that “Corinthians 17” predicts will usher in the rein of Mammon, son of Lucifer. (Don’t bother looking it up; it only exists, according to the film, in the version of the Bible found in Hell.) Such unabashedly bogus uses of Christian jargon pepper the movie: the gift of prophecy becomes the hottest new tool in forensics and criminology; while the plague imagery from Exodus becomes not a warning to repent, but simply a gross way for winged demonic beings to kill meddling humans.

At one point, Constantine’s sidekick Chaz wonders aloud why this divine gorefest doesn’t match up with the Biblical lessons in which he’s been brought up. The world-weary Constantine brushes aside all questions of discrepancy between traditional Christianity and the film’s unorthodox interpretation with a characteristically curt, “It’s not like the books.”

Perhaps screenwriters Frank Cappello, Kevin Brodbin, and Mark Bomback inserted the line to smooth over some of the ugly stitches in this Frankenstein of a religious piece. But like paranormal John Constantine himself, audiences can’t help but see the ugly truth beneath the skin. Some plot points are never adequately explained: how did Constantine return from hell the first time? When and how did Satan have a son? Characters’ motivations are equally murky—Gabriel, for example, comes off as part saint, part sadist, and we’re left guessing whether the archangel cares about humanity at all.

For all the pseudo-religious shenanigans of Constantine, its most astounding trick thus far has been its successful evasion of criticism from Christian media watchdog groups. Since Constantine’s release last Friday, the usual religiously conservative voices of outrage at pop-culture blasphemers have largely been silent. In recent years, movies taking similar liberties with religious content have drawn highly publicized protest: the 1999 comedy Dogma, for example, spurred the Catholic League to circulate petitions and run New York Times ads calling for a boycott of the movie. The outrage at 1973’s The Exorcist was so widespread and furious that the movie was banned in Great Britain until 1999.

So far the only organized effort to stop the viewing of Constantine has been undertaken by the government of Brunei, a small island nation known for its history of strict media censorship—and its overwhelmingly Muslim population. According to the Associated Press, the nation’s Censor Board deemed the film “unsuitable for public viewing,” though it declined to explain why.

The arts section of the well-trafficked Christiananswers.net gives Constantine a moral rating of “offensive” on its scale from “offensive” to “excellent,” but raves about the “fresh visualization of things that really do exist.”

If director Francis Lawrence and leads Reeves and Rachel Weisz (Angie) run the standard gauntlet of post-release interviews and appearances without saying anything particularly incendiary, the warped religious dimension of Constantine may just slip unnoticed beneath the radar of political correctness.

How does Constantine do it? After all, in the past few years, outrage abounded over the substantially less impressive magical doings of Harry Potter and Frodo Baggins, even as their “playing God” and messianic message lacked both the showy violence and overt Christian references of Constantine.

John Constantine, on the other hand, has a close if prickly rapport with the major angels and demons of the universe, and two symmetrical forearm tattoos that, when pressed together, create howling wind and various other supernatural phenomena. (This, too, is never fully explained in either the movie or most Sunday school curricula, but we assume it’s one of the finer points of the Catholic catechism.)

A particularly resonant scene of modern skepticism is one in which Constantine and fellow world-saver Angie dare to question the justice of the Catholic Church’s teaching on suicide; namely, that to kill oneself shows such disrespect for God’s gift of life that one could be damned for it. Angie demands that her sister receive a Catholic burial, and the priest’s refusal is portrayed as an inflexible slavishness to an outmoded rule.

My best guess is that Lawrence, Reeves, et al. get away with Constantine precisely because it is so flagrantly wrong. It patches together myth, history, and fiction with such postmodern glee that no single injury or injustice in its plotline piracies can be found. Cinematically, Constantine sets the stage for its myriad “borrowings” and patchworking of sources with an opening sequence of scenes that overtly steal virtually every movie trick in the book.

I swear every Mummy and/or Indiana Jones movie begins this way: an archaeological site in the desert, and the brown-skinned, blue-collar laborer who discovers the one artifact all WASPier scholarly types have been hunting. Then the information that the Spear of Destiny was last seen during World War II ­—it must have been the Nazi backup plan after the whole Holy Grail debacle in Alexandretta. Constantine’s ride, the Angel City cab, even uses the transportation-name-as-witty-commentary trick of A Streetcar Named Desire, or more recently, The Royal Tenenbaums’ Gypsy Cabs. Then the exorcism­—wait, was that Sigourney Weaver from Ghostbusters lying possessed on the bed? No, just some other actress who has captured that grotesque, demonic, yet unsettlingly sexual demeanor that adds a little extra pizzazz to any exorcism scene. It’s all wholesale theft, of course, but then imitation is said to be the highest form of flattery.

With this attitude, one can hardly find fault in Lawrence’s similar treatment of religious motifs and storylines. Few people will enter or leave the Catholic Church after having seen the movie, but neither effect was probably on the movie’s agenda anyway. Maybe, just this once, a very average movie will be taken for just that, and neither an outraged religious radicalism nor a dazzling success at the box office will proclaim the latest sign of the Apocalypse.

—Laura E. Kolbe