In every movie genre, there are certain inescapable rules. In scary movies, it's that the couple that has premarital sex is doomed to die. In action movies the rule is that the conclusion should be more spectacular than the rest of the movie. In acting, it's that Keanu Reeves will only ever act well when he plays a confused or stupid character.

"Constantine," the new action vehicle starring Reeves as John Constantine, comes close to bending, almost breaking, the last rule.

The key, it seems, is to place Reeves in a sinister gritty urban underworld. Once there, attack his character with forces that are almost impossible to comprehend, if not to Reeves, than to his straight man sidekick, in this case Rachel Weisz. Add in a lot of colorful but unexplained characters and you have what seems to be a hit, at least for the first 90 minutes.

When Satan appears, things start to falter, and by the end of "Constantine," the average viewer is bound to feel more confused than the characters that Reeves is most successful at portraying. What should be a rang-bang shoot-'em-up conclusion winds up a failed attempt at cerebral character development.

The movie takes place in the aforementioned gritty urban underbelly of an anonymous city. Reeves' Constantine is a man struggling to keep up a balance in a world that is stuck between heaven and hell. He uses a combination of holy reliquary, ammunition and grit to keep the forces of hell in line.

What should be a straight-up movie translation of the "Hellblazer" comic book series gets off to a promising start. Sure, there are characters that aren't fully developed, whose back story we don't know, but that takes a back seat to impressive computer graphics, including the portrayal of hell. This is, after all, a comic book movie, not film noir.

Reeves is rigid as the man who went to hell and back, but it doesn't seem to be a very demanding role. He teams up with Weisz and Shia LeBeouf for some flashy showdowns and exorcisms. Weisz carries the emotional conflict, LeBeouf handles the humor and Reeves has to cover the badass attitude which he does pretty well.

The problem may be that there are too many plot elements at work for the simplicity of the action vehicle. Several characters seem almost shrugged off.

Then there's the climax, which winds up being a combination of a suicide, bargain with the devil and attempted redemption. It's too much to swallow for any action movie and impossible for the mishmash of characters.

But when the man who came up with the story also wrote the script for Steven Seagal's loathsome "Glimmer Man," what can you expect?

Grade: B

This article appeared in The Marquette Tribune on Feb. 17 2005.,”Brian O'Connor”

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