cloze technique

For a variety of reasons to dull to mention, I watched Constantine last night. Yeah. The one from a couple years back, with Keanu Reeves.

A very odd duck.

It was technically rated R, but it felt like a PG-13 movie throughout. There was barely any blood, exactly one potent swear word and no naked at all. Apparently, ooky religious stuff is enough to make the special badness detectors at the MPAA peg the needle.

I largely ignored the fact that it was based on a comic that Iapos;ve read and have some familiarity with. That helped me to not be too bothered by the fact that the main character had changed continents, hair-colors and could no longer act. More perplexing was that he had at some point gained a sidekick with an alarming similarity to Short Round. He did at least smoke pretty steadily throughout the entire movie.

So apparently John Constantine is a paranormal detective in Los Angeles who hangs out in a mystical bowling alley full of bottles, a bar with loud music (to symbolize the presence of WICKEDNESS) and at a church where the angel Gabriel stands around. Heapos;s dying of lung cancer, and heapos;s fought things most people donapos;t even know the names of. To illustrate this, he never names them and only ever refers to one thing heapos;s done, which he did at the beginning of the movie. Thereapos;s some psychic cop with a suicided twin sister, and the barkeep who runs apos;neutral groundapos; which is apparently so neutral that only bad guys go there. One of those bad guys wears a nice suit, so you know heapos;s really bad. Thereapos;s also an indestructible Mexican with the spear of destiny (which is a genuinely nice prop, kudos on the design), but it takes a good long time for that to come back into the story.

All of that meanders and swirls around in order to occasionally insinuate that there is A BAD THING COMING and give us plenty of pretty neat demon effects (even if all the demons are the same Wayne Barlow design). We get to go to hell a few times, and hell was pretty nicely done.

After the guy who sells Constantine +4 Crossbow of Demon Slaying gets snuffed in his magical bowling alley, Constantine decides to get even. He goes and whales the tar out of the demon in the nice suit and at this point the pretty psychic cop gets kidnapped. Cue finale To my great pleasure, Short Round is murdered really good -- so good that I have to think that the screenwriters wrote his death to atone for him existing purely for As You Know Bob explanations -- heapos;s repeatedly smashed into the ceiling and snuffs it. The angel Gabriel shows, looks completely awesome, explains the plot and then smashes Constantine into a wall. With NOTHING ELSE TO DO, he cuts his wrists so the devil will come to take his soul. Old Scratch shows up, is very appropriately unctuous, and neatly ends the movie.

The movie was worth exactly the $6 it cost from the used bin. Pretty much purely because the ending was pleasingly clever and because Tilda Swinton utterly owned the movie as the angel Gabriel. Peter Stormare was damn fine as Lucky Lucifer, and he almost stole it back from Tilda Swinton.

Not nearly as bad as Iapos;d suspected it would� be, and not precisely outright bad at any point (though I did really want to see Shia Laboeuf snuff it, fortunately I was rewarded). A perfect time-wasting movie, though the sound mix was designed for maximum apos;cat in the lockerapos; shocks, meaning itapos;s really quiet and you have to strain to listen right up to the point where it loudly yells apos;booapos;. Also, the script kind of felt like itapos;d been patched together from two different movies.
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