An otherwise great movie isn't quite so great when the lead actor puts on a weak performance. Nonetheless, it is not as if the movie is suddenly not worthwhile. Think of Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York for a good example. But in a movie with a premise that's mediocre at best, poor acting can make the film downright atrocious.
Such is the case with Constantine, starring Keanu Reeves.
Reeves, who isn't exactly Oscar-material anyway -although I think many members of my generation loved him in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure -is completely miscast as the brooding title character, John Constantine. To be sure, Constantine is not what one would call a good guy, nor someone that one would like to meet in a dark alley. But he also is something of an exorcist, imbued with both the tools and the talent to cast half-bred demons back into the fiery pits of hell. You see, in this version of the world, the forces of God and Satan wage something of a shadow war on Earth.
Back to Reeves:
The character is obviously tortured, but his performance is so over-the-top that it is often unbearable to watch. Reeves painfully enunciates every word and speaks in a deep tone. The resulting mood is so dark that one cannot help from rolling one's eyes or laughing out loud. Constantine, a chain smoker, always theatrically flips open and closes his lighter, a practice that might have been cool once or twice, but quickly becomes annoying and clichéd.
Even when the film tries to be light (Constantine flicks off the devil in a key part of the film), it is clearly out of step with the overall mood. Simply put, this is a comic book movie (it's based off the graphic novel series Hellblazer) that, for all intents and purposes, is closer in intent to an Ingmar Bergman river of tears epic than the successful but genre-aware Spider-Man or X-Men films. In plain English -this is one pretentious bore of a film.
Constantine has a few positives -the special effects wizardry of the sweeping plains of hell and the general plot line of hell vs. heaven is somewhat intriguing. But otherwise, Reeves' performance and the general mood of the film do not work in any palatable or meaningful way. How Reeves is still in the profession is something of a mystery.
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Kyle Kondik
