The haunted heart of Constantine
“I had that trapped feeling, like some sort of a poor insect that you’ve put inside a downturned glass, and it tries to climb up the sides, and it can’t, and it can’t, and it can’t.” — Blues of a Lifetime: The Autobiography of Cornell Woolrich
An Angel City taxi cab delivers John Constantine to his afternoon exorcism. As Constantine gets to work, fighting to free a girl from the demon inside her, he realizes this isn’t your average ritual — something’s wrong, off-balance. Something’s coming. And Constantine isn’t just the first to notice, he’s the only guy who can fix it.
John Constantine stands at the center of a war waged between Heaven and Hell. Despite these cosmic circumstances, he’s just a guy trying to figure it all out. Constantine struggles with his mortality, with morality, with loss and loneliness, with a God he feels has forsaken him and an unfair universe. The characters who populate it are like him: desperate, disillusioned, backed into dark corners. 2005’s Constantine is hard-boiled horror, a supernatural noir where Keanu Reeves plays an occult Philip Marlowe, a man haunted by ghosts both figurative and real.
For some fans, the Vertigo/DC Comics character underwent a sacrilegious transformation: The film took him from London to Los Angeles, switched his blonde look to brunette, and replaced his trademark olive trench with a black coat. Though it’s not the most literal Hellblazer adaptation, Constantine is its own special thing, a film misunderstood at the time of its release. Over the years, though, it’s steadily gained the love and appreciation it always deserved.
Constantine languished in development hell at Warner Bros in the late ’90s. But the project had staying power, and after years of
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