Even non-Keanu Reeves fans will surely find something to enjoy in this one!
As John Constantine, a man born with the ability to recognise the angels and demons that walk amongst us in human form, Keanu is cool... he's stylish and, better yet, he's believable. He may even have done enough to convince naysayers to reconsider their opinion of him.
That's really saying something given the context of the piece. You see Constantine has been to hell and back (literally) after he took his own life to escape the tormenting visions of demons, which he has had since childhood.
Officially dead for two minutes (it felt like a lifetime in hell), John was resuscitated against his will and cast back into the land of the living. Now he patrols the earth (the border between heaven and hell) sending the devil's foot soldiers back to the fiery depths.
It's not that he wants admiration or even thanks for saving your soul, quite the opposite. He's a hard-drinking, hard-living bitter hero who scorns the very idea of heroism but sees this as his only way of earning salvation.
Trouble is Constantine seems to have a much harder time battling his own inner-demons than the very real spawn of Satan, which he despatches with relative ease.
That is until Angela Dodson (Weisz), a desperate and somewhat sceptical police detective, catches him with his guard down and enlists his help in solving the mysterious death of her twin sister.
Angela knows her sister Isabel, a devout catholic, would never commit suicide (a mortal sin) so she is puzzled, to say the least, to see footage from security cameras, which clearly show her jumping off the hospital roof.
Foul play is most certainly afoot and Constantine suspects the son of Satan has something to do with it but solving this mystery, you get the feeling, may not be as easy as exorcising demons from little girls.
If you're looking for pure entertainment, then you'd be hard-pressed to fault this movie; from start to finish you're treated to some incredibly stylish and slick storytelling with more than its fair share of jumps and jolts (you'll lose count of the number of times the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end).
It's a credit to the filmmakers that, thanks largely to the lack of confusing and irritating psycho-babble usually reserved for this sort of thing (cf. The Matrix Revolutions), you won't feel like you need to watch it again but, if truth be told, you'll really want to.
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