9 / 10
Official trailer
Constantine is a better film than its reputation suggests. Francis Lawrence directed in his feature debut. Keanu Reeves plays John Constantine, the chain-smoking occult detective from Vertigo Comics’ Hellblazer series. Rachel Weisz plays Detective Angela Dodson and her twin sister Isabel. Tilda Swinton plays the angel Gabriel. Peter Stormare plays Lucifer. Djimon Hounsou plays Papa Midnite. Shia LaBeouf plays Constantine’s apprentice. The film made approximately two hundred and thirty million dollars worldwide on a hundred-million-dollar budget but underperformed against studio expectations. It’s been slowly reassessed upward in the twenty years since release.
The Hellblazer purists hated the film. The comic-book Constantine is a blond British working-class con artist. The film Constantine is dark-haired American Keanu Reeves. The casting was the main reason fans rejected the film. That casting also turned out to work on its own terms once you accept the film as an adaptation instead of as a faithful reproduction. The performance is one of Reeves’s best in the genre tone he’s spent his career in.
I’ll take this over most of the comic-book films that came after it. I’m fond of its grime, its cigarette smoke and its dead-serious theology, and I like that it treats heaven and hell as a bureaucracy with loopholes. Reeves as a burned-out, dying exorcist dragging himself through Los Angeles is exactly my kind of hero.
The Visual Identity
The film has a strong visual identity that almost no other comic adaptation of the period had. It reimagines Los Angeles as a hot, dirty, ash-stained backdrop where heaven and hell have been waging proxy wars for centuries. The cinematography is grim and yellow-tinged. The production built the hell sequences from real Los Angeles locations subjected to wind-and-fire treatment. The visual coherence is the work of cinematographer Philippe Rousselot and production designer Naomi Shohan.
Francis Lawrence had directed music videos before this film. The visual style shows the influence. Every frame is composed. The lighting is dramatic. The film commits to its aesthetic in ways that more conventional adaptations didn’t. The result feels like its own world even when the script is borrowing from familiar Catholic-horror conventions.
The look is what sold me first. That yellow, ash-choked Los Angeles feels hot enough to sweat in, and the hell sequences are the best vision of the place I’ve seen in a mainstream film.
For Writers
A strong visual identity can raise familiar genre material. Constantine’s plot has the standard occult-thriller architecture. The visual treatment makes the familiar feel fresh. The lesson is that originality at the conceptual level is harder than originality in execution. Genre conventions can be inhabited instead of rejected. How you treat them is where your work’s identity comes from. Spend energy on execution.
The Cast
Reeves calibrates his performance for the role. Constantine is exhausted, dying of lung cancer, and very tired of being the only person who can do his job. Reeves plays him as a man who has stopped caring about whether anyone likes him and stopped caring about whether he likes himself. The flat affect that’s made Reeves the subject of decades of jokes is exactly correct for this character.
Tilda Swinton’s Gabriel is the production’s strangest casting choice and one of its best. She plays the archangel as an androgynous bureaucrat who has been responsible for too much human suffering and is now actively plotting to bring on the apocalypse to clean up the world.
The performance is unsettling. Peter Stormare arrives in the third act as Lucifer in a white suit with tar dripping from his bare feet and steals every scene he’s in. The performances ground the film’s serious commitment to its theology.
Stormare’s Lucifer is my favorite thing in the film. Tar dripping off his bare feet, that white suit and a greasy, delighted menace, and he gets barely any screen time at all. Swinton’s Gabriel is right behind him, and I’ve rarely been as unnerved by an angel.
For Writers
Casting choices that look wrong on paper can become the production’s signature if the actor commits to a specific interpretation. Tilda Swinton playing a male-presenting archangel was an unconventional choice that turned into a performance that ranks among the most memorable in 2000s genre cinema. The lesson is that obvious casting often produces obvious performances. Counterintuitive casting produces the chance for something unexpected. The risk is real. The upside is real too.
The Theology
The script takes its Catholicism seriously. The cosmology is specific. God and Lucifer have a wager about humans. Angels and demons can’t influence humans directly. They can only whisper. Constantine’s job is to deal with the half-breeds who have crossed over and broken the rules. His suicide attempt as a teenager damned his soul. He’s trying to earn his way back into heaven by fighting on the right side, which he gradually realizes isn’t really how the system works.
The final scenes, in which Constantine tricks Lucifer into preventing Mammon’s escape from hell and into reviving him from a moment of pulmonary failure, are theologically rigorous within the film’s stated rules. The trick works because the film has been laying the rules out across the runtime.
Constantine wins by understanding the system better than the antagonists. This is a more satisfying climax than most comic adaptations achieve.
That climax is my favorite stretch of the whole film. Constantine beats the devil with a loophole, and I love watching a hero win by reading the fine print better than everybody else in the room.
For Writers
Fantasy and supernatural fiction need clear rules even when the rules can’t be empirically verified. Constantine spends its runtime establishing how its cosmology works. The third act resolution depends on those rules. The audience trusts the resolution because the film has taught them the system. The lesson is that internal consistency is the foundation of supernatural fiction. The rules can be anything, but they have to be consistent. Cheat on the rules and the audience knows.
Craft Note
Francis Lawrence directed in his feature debut. Kevin Brodbin and Frank Cappello wrote, based on DC/Vertigo’s Hellblazer comic created by Alan Moore, Stephen R. Bissette, and John Totleben. Keanu Reeves as John Constantine. Rachel Weisz as Angela and Isabel Dodson. Tilda Swinton as Gabriel. Peter Stormare as Lucifer. Djimon Hounsou as Papa Midnite. Shia LaBeouf as Chas. Klaus Badelt and Brian Tyler composed the score. Released February 2005. Approximately one hundred million dollar budget. Two hundred and thirty million worldwide gross.
Is Constantine as good as people say?
9/10. I think it’s the most underrated occult thriller of its decade, and its reputation has been climbing, as it should. Reeves is right for this Constantine whatever the purists say, Swinton and Stormare are unforgettable in their short time on screen, and the theology plays fair right up to the final con on Lucifer. My only real gripe is that LaBeouf’s apprentice feels like a character the film forgot to finish. I’d welcome the long-promised sequel if it ever arrives.
