Kerry and I went to the cinema last night for the first time in ages. Constantine was the only thing on that we both wanted to see and to be honest: we weren’t expecting much. I was expecting something on the sillyness level of Van Hellsing but Constantine was actually quite good! It was very much in the same vein as HellBoy (though not as good), lots of religious/occult overtones, a decent main character but with less nazis. It was quite quite noir-ish in places, with Keanu chain smoking throughout the film and his dusty offices above a bowling alley seemingly always at night. They also covered a lot of ground in the film using quite a few characters that felt as though they had a lot of back story behind them. I wanted to know more about all of these characters. I’m tempted to go read some of the Hellraiser comics that it is based on now. Peter Stormare was excellent as ‘Lou’ and Tilda Swinton as Gabriel (yes, the angel) was disturbingly deranged.
We also saw a trailer for Sin City which looks excellent and has Jessica Alba (remember her) looking extremely hot with blond hair. A bit of IMDB later and I find that she is also in the Fantastic Four as The Invisible Woman. The studios do like their comic book adaptations at the moment.
If you read the graphic novels you’ll find they are fifty times better than the movie, which was watchable action tosh but really wasn’t Hellblazer at all. Alas, DC only selectively reprinted some of the stories in collected form so you’ll find gaps in there.
Joe - April 1st, 2005 @ 11:38 pm