Diehard fan of Swamp Thing and Hellblazer checking in. Too tired to write a proper review, but the short version is: I liked it for what it was, until the third act.
Hellblazer hat, off: I liked it, especially through the first two acts. The movie is much slower paced than one might expect, and has an interesting noir meets Hieronymous Bosch vibe that I quite liked. Keanu Reeves definitely brings his A-game to the acting. I think the filmmakers kept him looking a little too baby-faced throughout, especially because it seems that no matter what happens to him, he’s incapable of being physically bruised or bloodied, but that’s certainly not the actor’s fault. To the extent I think someone as young and pretty as he is is capable of looking world weary and cynical, he was decent. There’s no getting around the fact that he’s a limited actor, but he could have been a lot worse.
The plot? On its own terms, it works more than it doesn’t. Yes, there are some lapses in logic, but I thought the script was tighter than the average Hollywood effects film. There’s plenty to pick apart if one’s so inclined, but it’s not a gaping mess.
The “water as a conduit between planes of existence” bit didn’t work at all well to me, and resulted in some many close-ups of bare feet that I started to wonder who on the crew was indulging in a foot fetish.
There was certainly some cringe-inducing dialogue, but this aspect was better than I expected after seeing the trailer.
I thought the third act, when occult noir transforms into a generic action film that relied heavily on gadgets, was a victim of the average action movie cliches, and that was where disappointment set in. Almost all those scenes from the trailers and commercials that have given pause? Third act. The devil’s motivation at a crucial point was particularly inexplicable. At least the script avoided a partciularly cliched ending I feared. The after-the-credits scene left all the members of my group wondering about what should have been a key plot point, and I almost wish I hadn’t seen it.
Hellblazer hat on. Better than we’d feared, but it’s not really a Hellblazer movie in fundamental ways that have nothing to do with hair color, dress sense, location, or the pronunciation of “Constantine.” I originally hoped that this movie would be so far divorced from Hellblazer that I could easily separate the two, as with I, Robot. That didn’t happen, with mixed results.
There were a lot of nods and plot elements borrowed from Original Sins and Dangerous Habits. Beforehand, I would have guessed that stew would have been unpalatable at best, but in fact most of the time they worked very well. I particularly enjoyed the nod to Mnemoth, which was handled in a visually clever manner.
What follows are only the mildest sort of spoilers, but I’ll box them just to be on the safe side:
one of the elements I like best about Hellblazer is the injection of the superhnatural in perfectly mundane objects and settings. With a film this stylized, most of the time nothing is mundane, and that opens the way to the reliance on objects. One often felt that anyone could do magic, if only they had access to the “stuff.” I greatly prefer a mage whose power stems from knowledge and will rather than holy relics.
The element I think Hellblazer fans will object to most strongly is Constantine’s motivation and attitude toward God and heaven. I love the idea of someone who has absolute evidence of the existence of God and the Devil, and dislikes them both. There are elements of that present in the film, but for the most part, John’s motivation is to get into heaven to avoid hell, not to kick God in the teeth as he so richly deserves.
Overall, I think it’s better than many of the negative reviews would have one believe but it’s sufficiently flawed that I recommend it primarily for genre fans. Hellblazer purists should avoid the movie at all costs. I wish we had received a real Hellblazer film, but this could have been a lot worse.
I’ve been reading the reviews over at Rotten Tomatoes, and I’m appalled at how sloppy some of them are. I noticed several outright errors in describing key plot elements that were clearly explained in the film, for example, and don’t even get me started on how outright wrong many of the statements about the comic were. Ordinarily I’m happy with th quality most of the reviews I read there, but for some reason the fact that the movie was based on a comic book source seems to have blinded many reviewers into not looking at what was on screen. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen that sort of “it’s based on a comic, so it can’t be any good” reviews, of course, but this one seems to be drawing an unusual amount of knee-jerk reactions.
