Condemning the toiling of others By: Reverend   Mar 05-2005 I went to the movies the other day, and saw Constantine. I watched some trailers for it on the tee-vee, in which I saw Keanu Reeves shooting a gun that was shaped like a crucifix. As such, I expected this movie to be a stinker in the tradition of Dracula 2000. I was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be not all that bad. Keanu Reeves isn't a good actor, no getting around it. I never read the graphic novel upon which the movie is based, but I can tell what Keanu is getting at here. You can almost imagine the character he's trying to pull off, nearly see him, like the glow of the sun just before it crests the horizon. I know what's coming, but he doesn't quite make it. His performance is certainly the biggest turn off in this movie. The other actors do a much better job. I went the entire movie thinking that Monica Bellucci was playing Angela. However, Rachel Weisz is also hot and completely believable as the catholic cop and Keanu's principle love interest. She also had a cameo as her own twin sister. Tilda Swinton, who played the androgynous angel Gabriel, suited her part perfectly. I'm probably not alone in having imagined Gabriel as a man, but I wasn't put off when I saw that this film decided to go in a different direction. It works real well. However, Peter Stormare is the actor that really steals the show. He gets about twenty minutes of play as Satan at the end of the movie. He didn't have any demonic features, only a plain white suit the sort God usually wears when he's in the movies. He still comes across as frightening, more terrifying than any horned bat-type creature that typically personifies Lucifer. Certainly scarier than Al Pacino in the Devil's Advocate, so scarier than the jolly green giant anyways. The plot is simple. Satan has a son, the anti-Christ, who is sick and tired of waiting around for the Earth to fall to evil, so he decides to get born into the world right now damn it! Keanu is a real big prick, and an exorcist with lung cancer. He wants to stop Satan's son so he can save himself from Hell. Shia LaBeouf provides the comic relief as Keanu's smart-alicky sidekick. Rachel isn't hip to Keanu's groove and doesn't really know what's going on, but he lets her tag along anyhow so he can bang her later. That was a smart move on his part, and not just because of the subsequent nookie. She proves to be an instrumental part of evil's insidious plot. I give it three stars.