Review – Constantine

Sometimes comic books make a successful jump to the big screen. But step one in the process is almost always an act of translation, figuring out what elements are going to work in a movie and what’s going to have to be left behind. Unfortunately the folks who made this picture decided to haul the whole comic thing into the movie version. The plot. The awkward dialogue. The teen-oriented pseudo-theology. Even many of the camera angles are sharply evocative of comic panels. Also, here’s yet another movie with awful sound mixing, screeching noise intermixed with dialogue so soft I had to turn on the subtitles. And then there’s Keanu Reeves’s almost constant coughing. Just so I don’t seem like I do nothing but gripe, I did like some of the special effects. If they’d been put to a better use as part of a better movie, they might have been downright fun. Mildly amusing