“I need a mirror! Now! At least three feet tall!”, he barks – a line that presumably comes to Reeves rather easily.Walk down any LA street and the air is alive with winged, fanged furies, although no one seems that bothered: “What were those things?” asks Rachel Weisz’s cop, as if she’d just come across something funny in her seafood salad. The most impressive apparitions, however, are the more or less human ones: notably, the “half-breeds” who visit earth to influence humans for good or evil. In the case of the nefarious Balthazar, he looks as if he might offer you some questionable financial advice; played by British rocker Gavin Rossdale, he’s a Terence Stamp smoothie in pinstripes, his handsome smirk concealing a face of mouldy cabbage. Then there’s Gabriel, played by Tilda Swinton, who turns up in the rummest things these days: Vanilla Sky was a far cry from Jarman, but that was nothing. There was always more than a dash of Roswell in Swinton’s features, and here she’s really unearthly as a seraph in pink socks and a Phil Oakey haircut, coolly appraising Constantine’s chances of eternal salvation: “You’re fucked.”Technically, Constantine is damned because he once attempted suicide; in any case, he’s now successfully trying it the slow way, with a 30-a-day habit, presumably contracted while developing an ostentatious manner with a Zippo lighter. Reeves’s John Constantine is a two-fisted type who zaps Lucifer’s legions with holy water, a sanctified knuckle-duster and a golden 1920s-style Gat gun seemingly on loan from the Vatican armoury. A freelance exorcist by trade, he’s first seen curing a nasty case of the Linda Blairs with methods that Max von Sydow never dreamed of.
Like the peace of God, the new Keanu Reeves vehicle Constantine passeth all understanding. The forces of evil are abroad in Los Angeles, where ravening demons stalk the streets and the damned patronise exclusive nightclubs, striking the kind of poses last seen in 1980s vodka commercials. John Constantine – a sort of theological Philip Marlowe – is called on to get to the bottom of things, which he does literally, by visiting Hell. Apparently you can get there quite simply, using a domestic cat and a basin of water; you marvel that the film wasn’t prefaced by a kids-don’t-try-this-at-home warning. Hell is essentially Los Angeles after a nuclear attack, with palm trees ablaze and hordes of Francis Bacon demons with their scalps sliced off. As I recall, the last time a digital blockbuster visited Hades, in Vincent Ward’s barmy What Dreams May Come, it was inspired by the Dor?ngravings of Dante, and you had to be careful in case you stepped on Werner Herzog’s head (presumably he was there searchi
Like the peace of God, the new Keanu Reeves vehicle Constantine passeth all understanding. In the Matrix trilogy, the universe actually ended and then, simple as anything, began all over again, proving that in Hollywood, they interpret Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence as meaning: never rule out another sequel.Constantine is ostensibly just another comic-book adaptation, based – tenuously, as far as I can gather – on the Hellblazer strip and a character originally devised by Alan Moore But it has metaphysical pretentions.
The trouble is, we’ve recently seen Apocalypse of one kind of another so many times – Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, Deep Impact – that we’re barely impressed any more. n.barber independent.co.uk. Its central character is, in fact, Roo, a young kangaroo with a fondness for the un-Milne-ish expression, “kinda neat”. His frolics with his elephantine pal are so glutinous that anyone old enough for primary school will feel as if they’re having one of Pooh’s honey pots emptied over their heads: I thought that “Little Mr Roo” was the most nauseating song in history until I heard it reprised as “Little Lumpy Loo”.Darkness (15) is yet another horror film in which a family moves into an old house, having neglected to ask the surveyor to check for flickering lights, black gunk spluttering from the taps, and any history of human sacrifice. It resembles actual darkness in that it could help you fall asleep. As with 8 Femmes, though, it seems that Ozon was so chuffed with his catchy concept that he didn’t work too hard on its development.
Viewed individually, each vignette is a melancholy short story, but viewed together they don’t enrich each other, and Ozon’s principal insight is that people who are spiteful, deceitful and unfaithful all through their relationship shouldn’t be too surprised when it ends.Pooh’s Heffalump Movie (U) is another of Disney’s efforts to squeeze every last cent from the Winnie The Pooh franchise. It’s not as profound as it pretends to be, perhaps because it has the same man (Sergio Castellito) starring, directing, and adapting the screenplay from his own wife’s novel But it’s worth seeing for Cruz’s astonishing performance. Disguised by straggly bleached hair, yellow teeth and an entire set of luggage under her eyes, she is almost unrecognisable, but her fierce characterisation isn’t dependent on that.Fran?s Ozon’s 5×2 (15) gives us five scenes from a marriage in reverse order, starting with a couple’s divorce and jumping backwards, via a dinner party, the birth of their son, and their wedding, to the beach holiday which kindled their romance. So thin that you worry his limbs might snap, Bale is the most emaciated actor I’ve ever seen, and that includes Ethan Hawke.
Sadly, The Machinist doesn’t quite repay him for his commitment. It’s a murky psychological horror film with a twist I’ve seen in four other films in the last six months Bale plays an insomniac who works at a factory lathe. As spooky omens close in on him, he tries to figure out whether his colleagues are conspiring against him or whether he’s losing his marbles. But when the whole film has a greeny-grey pallor and the leading man could pass for a malnourished praying mantis, the answer to that should be obvious.Don’t Move (15), an intense Italian melodrama about a surgeon’s abusive affair with a chambermaid (Penelope Cruz), is another film distinguished by the shocking metamorphosis of one of the lead actors. Robots (U) is the new computer animation from the makers of Ice Age. In that cartoon, understandably, a lot of the backgrounds were white expanses, which could be why the director strove to cram so much eye-straining detail into every frame of Robots.