Stupid Things about the Hellblazer Movie

Cafe Society
1

This is based on the gossip from the website Avolonian linked to in this thread. Reading the website made me very angry. (I don’t think this has its own thread yet; I did a quick visual search and didn’t see it.)

I am (or, was) a big fan of the Hellblazer series, and own every issue of the comic up until Garth Ennis left (I’d already lost interest before that but just kept buying them). Typically, Hollywood is proving that they understand absolutely nothing (say it again) about how to make a comic book movie:

[ul]
[li]Keanu Reeves is cast as John Constantine. Stunningly miscast in every possible way. For starters, the character was based on Sting, so he looks completely wrong for the part. Although Reeves is pushing 40, he looks perpetually young; Constantine looks prematurely old.[/li][li]Constantine is completely a character that survives by his wits, not by action. Who here hears that phrase and immediately thinks, “Of course! Keanu Reeves!”[/li][li]To make the story more palatable to American audiences, they switched the setting and the character from London to New York. The comic, especially the Jamie Delano run, is quintessentially Bristish; it’d be like making a Sherlock Holmes movie and transplanting it to modern-day LA. But, of course, Americans just can’t understand British people.[/li][li]So they cast Rachel Weisz.[/li][li]Half of the examples of conceptual art on that page are of the cars that John Constantine will use. Half of the storylines in the Hellblazer comic begin with John Constantine getting the help of a friend because he doesn’t know how to drive a car.[/li][li]The site says that the movie was titled Constantine instead of Hellblazer so as not to be confused by US audiences with Hellraiser. The comic makes frequent mention that no one in the US knows to pronounce JC’s last name as “ConstanTYNE” instead of “ConstanTEEN”. It would be like renaming the Harry Potter movies to Hermione to avoid confusion.[/li][/ul]

Some of this stuff may be pretty anal-retentive – it’s the heart of a story that matters, right? Maybe, but all this smacks of a bunch of yabbos who don’t know the first thing about the material they’re translating. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen showed more respect for the source material than this. And we all saw how that turned out.

Plus, it just would’ve been damn cool to see a real Hellblazer movie. Every issue of the comic I read, I wanted to see it on the screen. Damn.

2

Doh! So after reading that site more carefully, I noticed that they did transplant the story to LA, not New York. (I swear in an earlier version of the “project” they’d planned for it to be in NYC, which would’ve still been horrible but not as dumb as LA.)

Hey, Los Angeles is “The City of Angels,” so it’d be really cool and deep and ironic to have angels and demons fighting it out just below the surface and back alleys of LA, where no one sees. What a brilliant and novel idea!

3

Oh God, that’s horrible. I hope a Watchmen or a V For Vendetta movie never, ever happens.

4

But that’s the problem, you see… the heart of the story of Hellblazer is John Constantine. If they can’t get the details (and being set in London/Great Britain is a pretty big detail, if you ask me) of his character right, then there’s no way that the movie’s going to be good.

My thinking is that they saw Constantine as a guy in a trenchcoat, and thought Who looks good in a trenchcoat? That Matrix guy should do! Typical Hollywood bullshit.

To me, the perfect may to open a Hellblazer movie would be the way Neil Gaiman introduced Constantine in Sandman #4: Constantine walking out of his flat on a rainy London day and greeting the city, having a short little dialogue with London itself.

Instead, we’ll probably get Keanu Reeves posing in a black (of course!) trenchcoat.

Hellblazer is one of my favorite comics of all time, and I’m not sure I want to even see the movie at all, even to see how bad it’s going to be.

5

Keanu Reeves as an Englishman.

I didn’t believe him as an Englishman in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” and I don’t think I’ll believe him as an Englishman in “Constantine.”

I am terribly afraid that this one is going to suck, friends.

6

That’s just it, he’s not playing an Englishman. The “John Constantine” of this upcoming film is an American.

I doubt the people involved in this travesty ever even bothered to look at a Hellblazer comic, they just saw a pic of John Constantine in a trench coat and heard there was magic involved, which is another thing they’ll get wrong. That it’s always peripheral, overt magic rarely appears in Hellblazer. In Constantine they’ll have Magic Kung-Fu, I’m sure. It’ll be the Matrix with spells instead of guns and demons instead of agents.

It’s also funny that they changed the name to avoid confusion with Hellraiser as first off I doubt most people even remember Hellraiser and thouse who do would hardly confuse the two, and second because the comic was originally to be called Hellraiser but was changed because of the Barker film.

7

Agreed.

But they should make Watchmen as an HBO 12 episodes mini-series.

Oh yeah.

8

At this point, it’s almost axiomatic that if Keanu’s in a movie, he’s miscast. This would be no exception.

I thiink a much better choice to play Constantine would be Callum Keith Rennie. However, judging by the other needless changes, I don’t think he’d be able to save this project.

9

This just can’t be true! I refuse to believe it. You can drag me to the theatres and show me the movie and still I will not believe it. An american Keannu Constantine is a depraved idea.

10

Blah, blah, blah, bitch and moan, bitch and moan.

This sort of thing gets old really quickly. Despite what you think, the vast majority of the movie going public has no F***ing clue who John Constantine is, nor do they care. Batman, they know. Superman, they know. John Constantine? Not a chance.

The result is that with a Superman/Batman movie, you don’t have to spend over 1/2 of the movie explaining or trying to explain your protagonists rational.

With Constantine, you do have to do this, in fact you’d probably have to spend 3/4 of the movie explaining his rational, leaving just enough time for some bright shiny explosions and gunfire. Lots and lots of gunfire.

Also, here’s a piece of advice which I suggest you heed: if you would like those in charge of the Hellblazer property at the movie studios to even semi-seriously consider your input, don’t insult them. Don’t insult the movie studios or the Hollywood system in general. Don’t insult any actors/actresses. And don’t use profanity or the phrase “this sucks.”

11

Um… yeah. When you go on the internet and belligerently try to put “bitching and moaning” fanboys in their place, you’re somewhat obliged to do so with an argument that makes a little bit of sense.

The character of John Constantine is a lesser-known, fringe character. That was never in question. The changes mentioned here do nothing to help that. Whether he’s an Englishman living in post-punk, post-Thatcher London or an American living in LA, you’re still going to have to explain what the character is about and set up the central conflict of the story. All these arbitrary changes are going to do is alienate the niche audience that was built into the movie just from the concept – you have to explain why JC is suddenly a younger American man living in LA.

And since when have movies based on well-known comic book characters been able to get away with no back-story? Superman is the story of the most famous comic book hero there is, and it spends half of the movie telling his childhood and his motivation (and he’s a pretty straightforward character to boot). Same with Batman, Spider-Man, and X-Men. Not to mention Men in Black and Blade, which were not well-known characters but still managed to tell the story from their source material without too many changes and without leaving the audience baffled.

This disdain that everyone has for “the general moviegoing public” is beyond tiresome. If you feel you’re having to talk down to your audience, you should stop what you’re doing immediately. If you’re making a movie based on a comic book and are afraid that you’re getting too “cerebral” or “out there,” you should get out of the business entirely. Simply put, there is absolutely no excuse for claiming something as source material, as this movie does with the Hellblazer series, if you’re going to make such sweeping, arbitrary changes to make it more “marketable.” If it’s not marketable in its original form, don’t bother making the movie. If you want to make a movie with Keanu Reeves as a trenchcoat-wearing, hard-driving, ass-kicking magician in LA, go ahead and make it, but just don’t say that it’s based on Hellblazer. What is so hard to understand about that?

It’ll be interesting to see how the Hellboy movie turns out in comparison. This is a weird concept with weird characters, but it’s being done with the involvement of the creator, and the director is a big fan of the series. I’ve got a feeling that it’ll never be a huge blockbuster, but if it’s truer to the source material, it’ll be a memorable movie and turn a lot of new people on to the comic.

Yeah, I’ll get right on that. I’d hate to offend all those Hollywood producers and studio reps who diligently follow the Straight Dope message boards. I’m not going to go out of way to offer my “input” to the morons (oops, I mean “hard-working gentlemen”) in charge of this fiasco, except by not paying to see the movie.

12

You’re right, and the movie will suck absolutely (I wish they’d change the name and deny it was based on a DC comic). However…

James Bond’s first onscreen appearance–a TV adaptation of Casino Royale–presented him as an American CIA agent. It eventually led to some movies you might have seen. *Constantine[i/] will suck, but a decent portrayal of the character might happen in spite of it.

13

It looks to me like a few of SolGrundy’s shells hit a little too close to home for BogieBlanca :slight_smile: