Constantine

Keanu - a man of many roles, but only one expression.

Hitting Australian screens like a spatula-flung turd this month is the religious-supernatural thriller Constantine.

Based on DC's Hellblazer comic, Constantine is set in Los Angeles in a world where Christian doctrine -- Heaven and Hell, angels and devils -- is reality. John Constantine (Keanu Reeves) is the chain-smoking, nattily dressed nemesis of Satan himself. A salty talker and a dab hand with a crucifix, Constantine is an exorcist, though he embraces this vocation out of self-interest, not devoutness.

A brief flashback reveals why. As a teenager, Constantine, a powerful psychic, was so tortured by his gifts that he tried to commit suicide -- and thereby condemned his soul to eternal torment. Luckily for him, paramedics revived him after he had been "dead" for two minutes, and postponed eternal torment for a few years at least. Since then, Constantine has worked as an exorcist, hoping to square the ledger and so sidestep his eventual repatriation back to Hell -- which seems imminent, as he has been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. But this canny moral accountancy can't save him because, as the archangel Gabriel (Tilda Swinton) explains, only a truly selfless act will earn him admission to Heaven.

The plot creaks into motion with the discovery, in the opening scenes, of a powerful religious artifact, which has the potential to unleash the son of Satan from the confines of Hell and bring about an era of murder, genocide, and reality TV. There's more supernatural ballast in Constantine, including a shitload of arglebargle involving a cop called Angela (Rachael Weisz) and her psychic twin sister, but none of it amounts to much.

Perhaps reflecting the demographics of its original comic-book audience, Constantine remains suspended in the amber of adolescent sensibility. Both character and film are hostage to the romance of alienation and of self-assertion through self-harm. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the callowness and cliché of their presentation. Unfortunately, after two hours of noirish, antihero posturing, scarcely a single hardboiled cliché is left unmolested.

The film's problems start with the script, but extend to casting. As Constantine, Reeves shows all the animation and acting skills of a pencil sharpener. First-time director Francis Lawrence can't coax anything more than phony posturing out of his leading man. To be fair, asking a director to elicit depth from Reeves is like asking an archaeologist to excavate a Petri dish. Still, the meagreness of Reeves' bag of tricks is disappointing. Just as it did in Speed, his depiction of a hardass consists of him lowering his voice an octave and reducing his emotional range from shit to nonexistent.

The other characters aren't much better. To be fair, depicting angels and devils has stymied far more creative types than the monkeys responsible for the script of Constantine. It's no surprise, then, to see the film settle for the arch androgyny of Tilda Swinton (reworking her role in Orlando) as Gabriel, and for the hamminess of Peter Stromare as Satan -- whose performance, quite frankly, seems better suited to Lemony Snickets. Even Weisz, usually a feisty screen presence, telephones her performance in. (Doubly disappointing is the tantalising amount of time she spends wearing wet shirts that never prove to be quite as revealing as you'd expect them to be.)

These deficiencies would be more palatable if the film was at least able to muster a few thrills. But despite a sizable bodycount and walk-ons from Satan, his son, an archangel, and a multitude of lesser demons, Constantine has all the suspense of a cake bake-off.

What memorable features Constantine does have are all visual. Director Lawrence's vision of Hell -- car graveyards, flaming gales, and caverns of writhing captives -- is arresting and well imagined. Likewise, the film's nicotine-coloured backdrop is beautiful -- and may be an obscure visual pun on Constantine's lung cancer. Continuing the cigarette theme, the film's best moment is an upward-looking shot of Constantine dropping a cigarette from a car window. It's only a moment, but it's startlingly original.

So, yes, the film is intermittently beautiful. But that's not enough. After all, a turd dressed in Armani is still a turd.

4/10

-- Hans Fruck