February 17, 2005
By Matt Savelloni
“THE HOTTEST PLACE IN HELL IS RESERVED FOR THOSE WHO REMAIN NEUTRAL IN TIMES OF GREAT MORAL CONFLICT.” – Martin Luther King
Another week, another comic book. Phew, anybody else seeing a trend here? One consistent trait about Hollywood is its reliance on cycles: genres fall in and out of popularity with greater frequency than celebrity break-ups. Comic books are the latest rage, specifically the fire and brimstone title HELLBLAZER, a strange, horrifying, funny, angry and amoral saga of one John Constantine.
First created by – who else? – Alan Moore in 1985’s SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING #37, John Constantine is raised in working-class Liverpool. His rough-and-tumble upbringing fuels a sardonic skepticism of the world that will serve him well in later life, years after a childhood interest in the occult leads him literally to the frontlines of the
battle between Heaven and Hell. Constantine is a warlock, a master of the occult. He moves with relative but reluctant ease between this world and the unseen one of angels and demons seething just outside our perception. It is Constantine’s awareness of the otherworldly and the rules that keep the various dominions from colliding that he exploits, first and foremost to save his own ass, but also to strike a balance amongst his inimitable contemporaries, some human, most not.
Surviving just about every heartache one heart, mind and spirit can endure and brokering deals with no less than the Prince of Darkness and God Himself, Constantine’s “adventures” hardly proclaim the traditional anthems of most comic books. Indeed, he appears during the industry’s Second Golden Age of the ‘80s and ‘90s when artists like Moore, Garth Ennis, Jamie Delano, Mike Carey, Frank Miller, Neil Gaiman, Mike Mignola and Todd McFarland are storming the medium’s ramparts, claming a new, edgier generation of fans.
“HELL IS AN OUTRAGE ON HUMANITY.” – Victor Huge
What sets HELLBLAZER apart from most other comics is its passionate dedication to the detective noir milieu. As Constantine moves from featured guest spot in Moore’s hands to the long-running HELLBLAZER series piloted most notably by Delano and Ennis, his roots as a wisecracking gumshoe are slavishly sustained. It is not coincidence that Constantine’s best mate is named “Chandler” with readers treated to femme fatales, punk music instead of jazz, trench coats, cheap suits with ties pulled askew, cigarette smoke and serpentine plots weaving confidently in and out of the blatantly fantastic. It’s Constantine’s gritty style that lends HELLBLAZER’s outrageous phantasms verisimilitude.
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Of course, Constantine pays a heavy price for his mysticism. Just about everybody with the unfortunate circumstance of circling Constantine’s orbit ends up crashing to a bloody end. He spends an entire arc enduring a terrifying confinement in Ravenscar asylum. And his inevitable use of magic brings corporeal, emotive and pious scars that will never heal, his command of such dark lore earning him blighted consequences over and again. HELLBLAZER is so distinctive and confident about Constantine’s character that it eschews the typical formula of hero versus villain. It remains passionately dedicated to simply exploring Constantine as a man who belongs to no one, nowhere and in no particular when.
One of the most sophisticated outputs of the comic neo-renaissance, HELLBLAZER is a boozing, swaggering fuck-you title that nevertheless poses serious moral questions, prompting readers to contemplate nothing less than their own mortality and the afterlife. A survivor, Constantine is our guide, the bemused, pissed off commentator on Dante-esqe damnation, Miltonian salvation and the war for both. Although capable of heroics, Constantine rarely seeks them out. His means are questionable, almost never “right,” and yet he evokes sympathy and interest. Because at the end of each exquisitely painful episode, we recognize that John Constantine is exactly like us: just another lost soul.
“HELL IS A HALF-FILLED AUDITORIUM.” – Robert Frost
At some point, the piper must come calling on these comic adaptations. To wit: ELEKTRA, stalled at $23 million, haunted by bad word of mouth and critical bashings. THE PUNISHER, $33 million, barely making back its budget. HELLBOY: despite favorable reviews, didn’t even recoup its production cost during its theatrical run. BLADE: TRINITY: the death knell of the series. LXG and FROM HELL: two of the bigger commercial and critical flops of the past few years. THE HULK: hardly lit the box office on fire and angered Hulk fanatics with its ponderous tone. DAREDEVIL: a solid performer marred by middling to poor reviews and a horrific ELEKTRA spin-off that managed to kill both franchises.
Studios do not invest billions to make stalled franchises with little crossover appeal that fanboys hate and critics barbecue which then must rely on rentals to turn a profit. The cold hard truth is that, with the exception of SPIDER-MAN and X-MEN, comic book movies are not the guaranteed success for which they are routinely mistaken. Why not? For starters, simply throwing the character up on the screen is not going to work. You still must mine the cinematic potential of the story and bring the select elements to the fore. And that is why CONSTANTINE looks so promising.
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Yes, I know the purists are upset Hollywood has “Americanized” HELLBLAZER by casting Reeves, but who did they expect, Olivier? Keanu Reeves is too often unfairly maligned. He is our Gary Cooper: stoic, subdued and iconic at anchoring wild tales like SPEED, THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE and THE MATRIX TRILOGY when he isn’t delivering overlooked gems in more mainstream films like MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO, PARENTHOOD, I LOVE YOU TO DEATH, MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, A WALK IN THE CLOUDS, THE LAST TIME I COMMITTED SUICIDE and THE GIFT. Look at that filmography. There are a multitude of “respected” actors out there who don’t have half the consistency of success in as many capacities as Reeves. I’m not saying the guy’s Paul Newman, but he’s not just Ted or an “F-B-I agent,” either.
As far as Constantine goes, Reeves is perfect. John Constantine is a traveler, both within this world and without. He is not contained by nationality and while I believe that singular English drollness would have added a welcome flourish to the film, I would rather see a more mature Reeves than any of the overexposed British matinee idols like Ewan McGregor, Jude Law or Orlando Bloom, all of whom would have been just as much of a departure from the Constantine of HELLBLAZER. Hey, if they wanted unfiltered accuracy, they would have cast Sting, Moore’s physical inspiration for the character.
HELLBLAZER offers a wealth of opportunity for a director to place his visual stamp on the film. The risk with CONSTANTINE lies in how far noted music-video director Francis Lawrence will go to impress. Just the term “music-video director” strikes fear in the hearts of cinemaphiles because it more often than not promises anemic, lowest-common-denominator narratives and short-attention-span compositions. Yet while the litany of directorial sins over the past twenty years extends predominantly from music-video mavens and their pestilent cousins, the commercial director, let us not forget that luminaries like Michele Gondry and Spike Jonze grew up in these same worlds.
Assisting Lawrence and Reeves in CONSTANTINE is a noteworthy lineup of character actors, Djimon Hounsou, Pruit Taylor Vince, Tilda Swinton and Peter Stormare, suggesting that Lawrence and producer extraordinaire Laura Shuler Donner cast according to the requisites of the role rather than just filling in recognizable names and faces. Of course, for the female lead they hired the luminous Rachel Weisz, a breathtaking actor with an ability like Reeves’ to push extraordinary fiction into suspended disbelief. Weisz’s natural beauty grows exceedingly potent the more mature she gets and yet it never overwhelms her talents. She has “presence” to burn.
Oh, yeah, and she’s English.
The future of comic book movies – or any genre – always rests in the next film released. With CONSTANTINE and the upcoming SIN CITY, V FOR VENDETTA and WATCHMEN, we see a turn toward dark, R-rated titles that hark back to the Slacker generation that created them. Then again, we will also be seeing new SUPERMAN, BATMAN, FANTASTIC FOUR, X-MEN and SPIDER-MAN films in the next two years so the traditional offerings are hardly disappearing.
But hey, this has gotta be better than those fucking video-game movies.
“A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.” – Aldous Huxley
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