But true atonement isn’t his purpose as much as saving his own hide from damnation.Ĭonstantine plays with shades of noir, from the doomed fatalism of the paranoid noir to the hardboiled noir of gumshoes like Sam Spade, Mike Hammer, and Philip Marlowe. As he racks up exorcisms, he hopes that someday he might meet some arbitrary quota that will satisfy God. He died for a few moments, and in that time, he was sent to Hell for what felt like a lifetime. In his youth, Constantine was driven mad by his ability to see half-demons and half-angels and tried to kill himself, a mortal sin that damned him. “He does it for kicks, to bedevil the devil,” Brodbin explained. Screenwriter Kevin Brodbin told Cinefantastique that he pitched John Constantine “like a rock ’n’ roll star of the occult,” a man who treats exorcisms like an extreme sport. In an interview with Sunday Express, Reeves called him a “warrior in this world of shit.” He is Heaven and Hell’s go-between, single-handedly keeping the universe from unraveling.
Half in half out, anyway.”) Here, the supernatural is quotidian - performing an exorcism is “like changing your oil,” Reeves told the Associated Press at the time of release.Ĭonstantine is a reluctant hero, a con man, a wise ass. With Constantine, Lawrence and his collaborators constructed a rich, textured world, one whose inner workings are intimately familiar to our protagonist, though he doesn’t always feel like explaining them. But the project had staying power, and after years of struggling and evolving, Keanu Reeves signed on to star in the film for music video director Francis Lawrence, who would make his feature debut. Over the years, though, it’s steadily gained the love and appreciation it always deserved.Ĭonstantine languished in development hell at Warner Bros in the late ’90s. Though it’s not the most literal Hellblazer adaptation, Constantine is its own special thing, a film misunderstood at the time of its release. 2005’s Constantine is hard-boiled horror, a supernatural noir where Keanu Reeves plays an occult Philip Marlowe, a man haunted by ghosts both figurative and real.įor some fans, the Vertigo/DC Comics character underwent a sacrilegious transformation: The film took him from London to Los Angeles, switched his blonde look to brunette, and replaced his trademark olive trench with a black coat. The characters who populate it are like him: desperate, disillusioned, backed into dark corners.
Constantine struggles with his mortality, with morality, with loss and loneliness, with a God he feels has forsaken him and an unfair universe. Despite these cosmic circumstances, he’s just a guy trying to figure it all out. John Constantine stands at the center of a war waged between Heaven and Hell. And Constantine isn’t just the first to notice, he’s the only guy who can fix it.
#Movie heaven hell architect free#
As Constantine gets to work, fighting to free a girl from the demon inside her, he realizes this isn’t your average ritual - something’s wrong, off-balance.
Blues of a Lifetime: The Autobiography of Cornell WoolrichĪn Angel City taxi cab delivers John Constantine to his afternoon exorcism. “I had that trapped feeling, like some sort of a poor insect that you’ve put inside a downturned glass, and it tries to climb up the sides, and it can’t, and it can’t, and it can’t.”
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