Constantine: Sunday Night at the Movies

Hmmm – here’s an interesting one to catch on a Sunday night …

As you’ll no doubt be aware, if I’ve quiet Saturday night, I’ll have friends over, to catch a movie.

Hopefully, by the time Brentwood’s cinema gets built, my finances will have improved enough to walk up there, and buy a ticket.

Here’s hoping!

But, for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working: so, when Adrian suggested popping over, to catch Constantineº, which neither of us had caught in a while, I was up for it.

Shame no one else could make it: I think there’s a week left on those blessed kettle chips …

It’s also a shame no-one else could make it, either, because Constantine is certainly worth watching, if only once or twice.

Now granted, myself and Adrian have seen comic book heroes before and can both put the original Blade, V for Vendetta, and Dark Knight forward as better examples of the genre turned into films – along with Tank Girl as an example of a bit of a stinker – but Constantine itself does managed to show us something we both think we can agree on.

A flawed hero: which John Constantine certainly is given that, unlike many other Hollywood characters, he smokes like a pile of burning leaves.

We certainly didn’t agree on the casting: I still think that Bruce Willis would have been an interest choice. Or possibly Jason Statham …

One thing I’ve found from the Wikipedia entry on the character is that – as originally conceived by a certain Alan Moore – is very different. And something I wouldn’t’ve have minded seeing, myself.

But I can’t complain too much. Keanu Reeves is a capable actor and leading man, and usually can be guaranteed to do well with any given script.

And the rest of the casting is very well done, as well: Rachel Weisz as both Angela Dodson, and her dead twin sister, Isabel, Shia LeBouef as Chas, Djimon Hounsou as Papa Midnite*, and Tilda Swinton as the very ambiguous – or, at least, ambiguously hairdo’ed – Angel Gabriel.

Actually, that’s a point.

In some religous traditions, angels are seen as genderless.

Certainly in many Christian ones, Gabriel is seen as male: given that Tilda Swinton famously played Virginia Wolfe’s gender hoping hero, Orlando, that hairdo seems very appropriate.

As does Swinton’s casting as Gabriel in the first place …

But back to my earlier point: we did get to have a good natter about that, we thinking automatically back to Who Watches The Watchemen as the archetypal flawed superheroes story, and Adrian making the mother of all counterpoints.

That the original flawed super hero would’ve been in Greek myth.

Hercules.

Who he had to remind me was sentenced to do the Twelve Labours as a result of killing his family.

Certainly what I call upping the argument ante!

There’s another thing we agreed on, as well.

We’ll both admit to happily differing on religion: I’m more agnostic, Adrian tends to make Richard Dawkins look like the Pope.

But we both felt you could dig through the Vatican’s backlog and find endless fuel for a film.

Which already ranges from Constantine and The Exorcist at one end, through Stigmata and The Da Vinci Code, and ending up somewhere near Nuns on the Run and The Pope Must Die.

Via the Hanger Lane gyratory system, in the last two cases …

Anyway, for now, that’s where I’ll leave things, I am pooped. I’ll update things in the morning.

Until then …

* Wizards. I always have something of a thing about wizards. Q, the Finn, Doctor Who …

º Just as a final thought, having read the Wikipedia entry on the original comic book character, how much influence it had on ITV’s Demons. It just seems that the Phillip Glenister character – Rupert Galvin – seemingly had a very superficial resemblance.