The works of Alan Moore haven’t been treated too kindly on the big screen. His From Hell was adapted into a thoroughly ordinary Jack the Ripper movie that jettisoned exactly everything that made the comic worth reading. His League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - well, let’s just skip that. I get enough hate mail as is.

John Constantine was a character Moore created during his Swamp Thing run, which was really the genesis of Vertigo Comics, the adultish imprint from DC. Visually based on tantric sex god and car pitchman Sting, the character was a British street magician (and not of the David Blaine kind, although Constantine was more than happy to use blatant bullshit to get his way) who smoked Silk Cut cigarettes by the case, swore in that authentic British way and who has been one of the more stringent anti-heroes in comic books.

Maybe it’s the fact that other writers after Moore have had a chance to shape the mythos of John Constantine that keeps the film version of the character from being the third strike against bringing the bearded genius’ canon to the screen. The Warner Bros film Constantine, which is in no way a great movie, is a serviceable take on the property that manages to be at once appallingly liberal and nicely faithful to the character.

One of the banes of modern comic movies is the insistence on giving each character an origin film. We already know why Batman wears that dumb suit - get to the goodies. Bryan Singer has the good sense to leave the backstory bullshit out of his upcoming Superman Returns and, for the most part, so has Constantine’s director and screenwriters. At times the movie feels like you just randomly picked up Hellblazer #156 (for the uninitiated, Hellblazer is the name of the comic John Constantine stars in) or something. And that’s a cool thing for a major film - the theory is that audiences want to feel included, but this film has the balls to be an immersive experience. You get thrown into the middle of it (although of course there is a character who gets to learn the score so the audience can catch up, but this is Hollywood, not art).

That’s one of the nice things that’s faithful to the comics. John Constantine is always running into people he knows and mentioning horrifying sounding adventures that have never been chronicled in the pages of any comic. He’s a character with history, which is really just as much a rarity in the comic world as it is in the movie world (consider that #0 and #-1 issues were all the rage for a while and you can begin to understand the comic nerd’s craving for solid history and backstory). One of the things that is shockingly unfaithful to the comic is the main character’s nationality. For reasons of what I suppose is identifiability, Constantine has been Americanized. I don’t think it detracts too much from the character, but I do have to wonder if Americans are so awful they don’t want to see a movie populated with people speaking in accents.

So the American John Constantine, decked out in a long dark coat, stalks the streets of a darkly noir LA fighting demons and other servants of darkness. If that reminds you of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off Angel, you aren’t alone - the LA locale is poorly chosen, giving the proceedings a generic feel. LA is a town that has no weight or history - someplace eastern, maybe someplace riffing on a Miskatonic-like Lovecraft feel, would have been better suited. Of course the lightness and emptiness of LA is surely one of the reasons the film is set there (I mean, they could have just set it in Vancouver and been done with it all if it was money that decided the location), but the joke feels hollow. Like the town.

Keanu Reeves plays Constantine. He’s a weird choice, to say the least. Getting past the fact that he doesn’t look like the character (and really, how important is that in the end?), Constantine’s sassiness doesn’t come naturally to the actor. Unfortunately the part wasn’t rewritten with him in mind, and rather than playing to Reeve’s low-key, deadpan strengths, the role forces him to try to be witty, to have some banter and to be sarcastic. Keanu really tries, you have to give him that much. And it’s to his credit that he doesn’t outright fail - his performance never really nails Constantine, but he never truly screws the pooch either.

Thank God, because he’s very much carrying most of the movie. The vast majority of Constantine’s running time is waiting for the Spear of Destiny - the spear a Roman soldier shoved into the side of Christ at the crucifixion - to get to LA to be used in something bad (the movie has an illegal alien as the bearer of the Spear, while Constantine is repeatedly telling us that he "deports" demons. If only the movie had a character comment on issuing driver’s licenses to demons I would think we were dealing with political allegory). While Constantine runs around doing some stuff we’re pretty aware that it’s all placeholding for some sort of big apocalypse at the end, so we have to be willing to deal with Keanu for an hour and half. He’s at his most charismatic in years, which isn’t really saying a whole lot for an actor who seems to embody Zen nothingness, making him the perfect Little Buddha and messiah of The Matrix.

To be honest, I didn’t mind a lot of the placeholding taking place during the course of the movie. First time director Franics Lawrence has a great visual style, which doesn’t get in the way of the proceedings. It’s sort of refreshing to see a film like this where it’s understood that visual whizbang and overall art design need to be service to the story, need to be there to enhance or explicate the plot or characters or themes. How far has the mainstream movie fallen that you take special notice of it when someone doesn’t fuck up their movie with excessive MTV stylization?

The middle portions of Constantine are also buoyed by some fine supporting actors. I’m going to risk my reputation here and say that I didn’t mind Shia LaBeouf as Constantine’s sidekick and driver Chas. He’s kind of annoying, but he’s supposed to be, and he adds a bit of spunk to the proceedings that Reeves doesn’t and I mean that in the non-gay porn way. Max Baker plays Constantine’s Q, Beeman, and is more fun than he should be in such a small role; the same goes for roly poly Pruitt Taylor Vince, who plays an alcoholic priest with a connection to the Other Side and who gets a cool little scene with some liquor bottles.

Tilda Swinton is the angel Gabriel, and while I appreciate the attempt at androgyny, I don’t think it quite works - she’s just too inherently feminine. Still, I enjoyed her, which is more than I can say for Peter Stormare’s Lucifer - he plays the devil as just a little too loopy for me. I prefer the suave, Bowie-influenced Lucifer of the Vertigo universe.

Meanwhile the battle for my favorite supporting player somehow comes down to Djimon Hounsou as the voodoo priest Papa Midnite and Gavin Rossdale of Bush fame as Balthazar the demon. I know, I can’t believe it either, but there’s something about Rossdale’s pre-fab pop good looks that really does make you believe in Hell. His Balthazar is the slick corporate face of the Underworld, while Papa Midnite is the wild and crazy neutral guy whose bar is the meeting place for the forces of light and darkness. There isn’t enough of either of these characters, and I wonder if they didn’t end up on the cutting room floor - there’s a scene where the two take a meeting that leads noplace.

Rachel Weisz is Keanu’s costar as a tough cop who has an unerring ability to find the baddest bad guys and to know just where to shoot them. It turns out that her twin sister the psychic has taken a header off a hospital roof and Weisz’ character can’t believe it was a suicide. She serves as the audience identification character - we learn about the mystical and magical world of Constantine mostly through her. Weisz is sublimely beautiful, but there’s nothing about her that says “cop” to me, let alone “tough cop.”

While Weisz is the audience identification character, the script doesn’t use her inexperience to deliver long mumbo jumbo monologues - all too often movies like this feel the need to couch their mystical and spiritual elements in overheated expository dialogue, a magical version of Star dfvTrek’s insistence on fake tech jargon. Constantine dips into the fairly familiar pool of teen goth darkness and pop cult spirituality (it’s like Celestine Prophecies meets The DaVinci Code as reinterpreted by an angsty 19 year old who knows about but has never read the Gnostic Gospels); it’s got a patina of darkness that’ll delight the kid in the Morbid Angel shirt but won’t keep your kid sister from digging it.

One of the things that makes the film’s darkness palpable is its special effects. Constantine uses CGI nicely, including a very cool demon made up of insects and snakes and other creepy crawlies. I only wish that the movie had that much inventiveness the whole time - the soldier demons that Constantine takes on the most are well designed (their heads are cut in half at the nose, and all they have is empty brain pan), but after a while you hope for some diversity in enemies. Also, the vision of Hell here is sort of interesting, but it’s essentially LA after a nuke goes off, so there’s something less compelling once you’ve figured out what you’re looking at. In fairness, though, there’s only one truly bad effect (don’t get me wrong, there are a bunch of cheesy ones throughout, but they tend to be good naturedly cheesy, if that makes sense), and that’s a Bosch-inspired Hellcavern. It’s a squandered opportunity.

Honestly, squandered opportunities haunt the film. Constantine is definitely intended as a franchise starter, and maybe that’s why they didn’t pack the film with the kind of texture and detail the 200+ issues of the comic offers. Constantine’s friends are drably human and alive, the same ritual is used again and again to visit Hell or see visions, and the “Holy Shotgun,” which worried fans in preview images, is sort of not that impressive or that big a deal. When you have a character like Constantine, half the fun should be the bag of tricks he uses to fight the bad guys. I’m hoping that this is Spider-Man syndrome - the filmmakers start the series with a conservative first feature and open up the throttle in future installments.

And Constantine deserves future installments. This film isn’t making anybody’s top ten films for the year by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s stylish and kind of cool. Constantine was one of the movies I most feared this year, and while they were all low, the film exceeded every single one of my expectations.

7.2 out of 10