Okay, I'm a sucker for a decent apocalyptic action flick and Constantine is decent enough. Our action hero in this case is John Constantine, played by Keanu Reeves. It's the same role he played in The Matrix, plus a hacking cough and dusted over with a bit more world-weary grit. But I say, keep doing what you're good at, Keanu. And besides, The Matrix was an apocalyptic action flick as well, albeit dolled up as smarty-pants, cyber-punk existentialism.

The big difference is, when writing straight-up apocalyptic action material--even if you're simply cribbing material out of Catholic Eschatology for Dummies--you're going to end up with more and deeper substance than if you're trying to fake up the Meaning of Everything all by yourself. Which is why The Matrix ended up running on empty through the two sequels. There was ultimately no there there.

There's a lot more here here, even if the battle between good and evil comes down to cliched beat-em-up and shoot-em-up sequences. As with most movies these days, it just doesn't look like a Frank Miller comic, it is a comic. And appropriately, as required by the genre, Constantine takes a simplistic, dualistic, Miltonesque approach to the material (all action movies are exercises in dualism).

Which, of course, means that the devil gets to show up in the last act and chow down on the scenery. It takes a good bad guy to make these movies work, and though most of the villains our hero and heroine battle are special effects monsters, Gavin Rossdale as the creepy Balthazar, Tilda Swinton as Gabriel (with a chip on her shoulder the size of a redwood) and especially Peter Stormare as the devil, make it worth it. I just wish they had more screen time (like, all of it).

I stress that Constantine belongs to the action flick genre, along with, for example, Schwarzenegger's End of Days (which I also enjoyed, so you know where I'm coming from). So that right there has me adjusting my expectations considerably downwards. The reward, as I've mentioned, is that some small aspect of actual Christian theology eventually gets treated seriously and hammered out. Okay, hammered into a twisted wreck, but at least there's metal under the mallet.

Most of the complaints I've read about the movie seems to be that it doesn't make sense and/or that it's not like the comic. I can understand the latter, but don't really care since I've never read the comic. As for it making sense, it made perfect sense to me, but, then, I grew up immersed in this stuff. In fact, all I really want out of this type of movie, besides it not boring me, is that at some point we get a good shot at a Devil & Daniel Webster debate, and here it does deliver.

Constantine's approach is to start more cynical than most--it makes End of Days look downright orthodox--putting it (initially) in the same league as Dogma and the Japanese series Angel Sanctuary (thumbs up on both). The formula is simple: pick some off-beat aspect of the theology and take it really literally. The result hit and miss, but theology is so rarely taken seriously even by the religions themselves, that the nugget in the bucket of gravel is worth the digging to me.

Consider the best "Mormon" movie yet made. It's not even a movie. It's "Covenant," an episode in the Chris Carter television series, Millennium (season 1 disc 4). Although the episode takes place in Utah, "Mormon" is never mentioned, but the story rests solidly on a particular point of Mormon doctrine. And that, frankly (and unfortunately), is rare. (A later episode of Millennium also features a wonderfully clever adaptation of C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters.)

By comparison, most "Mormon" movies are primarily about Mormon--specifically, Utah--culture or history. The most "theological" of the lot, God's Army, is still more about the culture of missionary life than a life or death point of belief. Brigham City could be remade in any small town in northern Minnesota. (It's called Fargo.)

The capitalist in me says, hey, if that's where the money is, then keep at it (except that Mormon movies don't make much money). The artist in me says that the wrong kinds of movies are being made. No, not high-budget apocalyptic action flicks (for obvious reasons), but low-budget, art house horror movies that Japanese directors such as Hideo Nakata (The Ring, Dark Water) have specialized in, and that American studios are busily copying.

Horror as well requires theology and transcendence to be taken literally and seriously. Card's foray into popular horror, Treasure Box, was a sadly missed opportunity. Card denatured it of all Mormon content, and without a Mormon theological foundation, it turned into a poor, Stephen King facsimile. But I can understand why he backed off so far from the book's potential. Take Mormon theology seriously in such a genre? No, we're not ready for it. Leave that to the Catholics.

And one last thing about Constantine: the very last scene in the movie actually follows the credits. It's worth waiting for, and is pretty important to the plot, besides.

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Eugene Woodbury
July 20, 2005