Curate’s* egg. Go see it.

(*Or a priest’s, or some other religious type, holding aloft a crucific and warding off the encroaching armies of demonic pestilance, in graphic CGI.)

I probably went to see this movie in the wrong frame of mind. It’s nonsense. And if you don’t approach it too cynically†, you’ll enjoy it. At any rate, it has some power beyond the narrative, and the images stayed in my head long after I watched it, which is quite a compliment for a nonsensical movie.

(†Where ‘cynically’ means in expectation of a coherent plot and solid performances.)

Keanu’s performance is… overblown and pompous. It worked in The Matrix, but then that movie was even more stylised than this one. I couldn’t warm to him at all. He came across as a tit. In fact this movie reads hugely like The Matrix meets The Exorcist, sometimes literally.

The film also suffers from trying to take its moral pronoucements far, far too seriously. And Tilda Swinton is (sorry Tilda) cringingly bad (the script doesn’t help) as some evil tomboy archangel. And why—why—does Keanu Constantine Reaves, allow his supposed sidekick/buddy to expire at the end of the film, but begs for the soul/life of his love interest’s sister. What a bastard. Though to be fair, there wasn’t too much buddy-buddy chemistry between him and his sidekick to start with, so maybe Constantine just didn’t actually like his sidekick very much and was happy to be shot of him. Despite the fact (I’m sure) that said sidekick had just saved his life. Still, the Satan–lung-cancer bit at the end was quite a nice twist‡.

‡ No I’m not giving away the ending; for all its flaws, I still think it’s worth seeing. Just be prepared to approach it with a more indulgent attitude than I did.

But the special effects are ace. And the vision of heaven and hell and angels and demons and people and their souls which the movie paints are thought-provoking and vivid. (Okay, they nicked some ideas from the Catholic church, but it all still has a lot of emotional impact.) Suspend disbelief, switch the lights out and enjoy with a nice bottle of communion wine.