Constantine

Scott Hardie: “It was ok.”

[Spoilers ahead.] My review of “The Prophecy” has been lost to time, but in it I wrote of one of the most precisely defined subgenres in all of cinema, the one whose films concern an eternal war between heaven and hell with humans caught in the middle, where a single human woman will turn the tide of war (often because she carries the unborn anti-Christ), and where a world-weary human man is unfazed by encounters with Biblical headliners like Gabriel and Uziel only to wind up face-to-face with Satan himself. So many Catholic-derivative films have shared this exact premise that they have become a category unto themselves, and it becomes pointless to compare them against each other because they’re just so damn much alike. “Constantine” repeats the formula with a gargantuan budget and some damn slick photography, but it struggles with the same plot holes that all such films seem to, such as why an omnipotent God can possibly be engaged in an eternal war, and why humans are so arrogant as to place ourselves at the center of a struggle between beings of sometimes infinite more power and importance than us. Oh well; it’s a fun movie, just not a remotely remarkable one.

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