Constantine Review
If nothing else this movie reminded me of a personal philosophy: all movies, at their core, are good movies. It’s no different to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s quote on how we are all good by nature but corrupted by society. Granted that society in this place, whether obvious or debatable, are the pundits. From my experience you either get a movie that has a good heart but is unbearable in every other respect or you get one that deserves all the Oscars in the world even though you may as well flirt with misanthropy the way the filmmakers probably did to have accomplished a vision like that. Granted that not only can you enjoy both but movies that achieve this balance are possible. You just rarely get a movie with a good heart that is Oscar worthy if not a movie that is half and half, making it worthy of three out of five stars to prove it was mostly good. When I saw Constantine in theaters I didn’t really know what to make of it. On one hand it was fairly dull for anyone who had seen The Exorcist (like myself at the time), but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t appreciate the idea of someone who could see people as either angels or demons. I guess my biggest gripe was (at the expense of being equally as uninspired) that it was the equivalent of ordering a Sprite and getting a flavorless seltzer-like beverage in its place. I understand that making fantasy-horror-action movies is a tricky, if not flat out impossible feat, but does that mean it hasn’t been successfully done before? I know not everybody can be Sam Raimi, Joel Schumacher, Robert Rodriguez, Tim Burton, Katheryn Bigelow, Clive Barker, Zack Snyder, Alexandre Aja nor even Takeshi Miike when it comes to these concepts. But we were already saturated with these kinds of horror movies in the 2000s. what trouble would it have gone to in order to reach the same good enough levels as Cabin Fever, Wendigo, or even Willard if it already took one risk with all these genres from the start?