Are you smarter than the devil? Keanu is!

Having grown impatient to broach this topic, I am betraying any sense of linear chronology vis-a-vis Keanu's career. As much as I would like to tuck in to the hockey melodrama Youngblood, or the strangely blank regional drama Prince of Pennsylvania, or that idiotic After Hours-ripoff he did with Lori Laughlin... Friends, this particular film begs our immediate attention.

Oh yes, I am referring to Constantine. This movie defies logic. Not in terms of story or plot; the internal logic of this movie's story is so dumbed down a brain-dead laboratory ape would be insulted. The logic defied is: a movie that completely betrays the essence of an established character, and provides no original situations or interesting ideas, should not be so much fun to watch.

If any of you have read the first fifty or so issues of the comic Hellblazer, you know how smart, witty, and bewildering John Constantine can be. Even if you are too stuck up to admit to liking comics, you would have to admit he is a very engaging, intelligent character. A con man, second to none, who bows to no God, and trounces every demon solely with his wits and superior tactical abilities.

This describes nothing of the John Constantine in Constantine. Granted, this isn't really Keanu's fault, as the changes made to the character were likely the perspective of the director and the studio suits. Fighting demons by out thinking them probably doesn't make for many satisfying action sequences and cool explosions, the only current justification for a decently budgeted comic book adaptation. Perhaps if the filmmakers had totally divorced this movie from the source material I could feel good about liking Constantine.

But Keanu Reeves playing a character that can out think the Devil, much less ANYTHING?! Pah, I say. Double-Pah! I find it hard to believe that Keanu Reeves has the spiritual fortitude to remove a clog from a bathtub, much less a demon from a little girl.

This movie is purely emblematic of the deliberate enforcement of mediocrity in our culture. Why else would an illiterate cretin be chosen to portray the most cunning, intelligent character in a literary universe?

Unfortunately, I am no closer to figuring out why Constantine is enjoyable, despite every component of it being infuriatingly banal. Gavin Rossdale as a demon?