Constantine Review

Purists were right on the facts and wrong about the result. John Constantine on the page is a working class British trickster who wins by lying; here he is an American with a terminal cancer diagnosis and a bulletproof deadpan, and the film builds a whole cosmology around him instead of a personality. That cosmology is the appeal. Half breed angels and demons who cannot directly intervene, a Hell rendered as Los Angeles in a permanent nuclear firestorm, holy water in a bathtub, a shotgun cast from crucifixes.

Francis Lawrence came from music videos and gives every frame a rich, tarry darkness. Tilda Swinton plays Gabriel as a bored androgynous bureaucrat and Peter Stormare arrives late as a Satan in a white suit with tar on his feet, and the two of them are worth the ticket alone. What lets it down is the writing. Rachel Weisz is given twin sisters and no interiority, the exposition arrives in flat lumps, and the plot resolves through a rule the film invents in its final minutes. Cult status is deserved.