COMIC-CON: Keanu Reeves shows us CONSTANTINE (Part One)

By: Patrick Sauriol and Den Shewman
Date: Friday, July 23, 2004

Today Warner Bros. held a special panel at the San Diego Comic Convention to promote their upcoming horror film CONSTANTINE. The film's leading man, Keanu Reeves (John Constantine), as well as co-star Djimon Hounson (Papa Midnite) were in attendance to present footage from the film, discuss the movie and answer questions from the audience.

A special reel of footagee from the film, including the recently released trailer, was shown to the crowd. In total the material screened ran for 18 minutes and showed a number of scenes from what appears to be just the first half of the film. While what was shown was still in a rough form (some places used temporary special effects), the material screened suggested that CONSTANTINE will be a dark horror film, and that director Francis Lawrence's strong visual style will, at the very least, make for some intriguing imagery.

Please note that, since this report describes the footage shown in CONSTANTINE, including describing certain scenes from the movie, a spoiler warning must be issued. Decide for yourself if you want to read further or not!

Seemingly to address the controversial decision to make the John Constantine character in the film a dark-haired American as opposed to the blonde Brit he is in the comic series, the movie footage began with a shot of Constantine smoking. (The character is a chain smoker in the comics as well as in the film.) In fact, there were at least six shots of Constantine lighting a cigarette in the footage shown at San Diego.


Next came a scene set in a place that appeared to be an urban wasteland, where a man finds a peculiar object wrapped in a Nazi flag. The man unwraps the flag surrounding the object which appears to be a metal spearhead of some kind. Upon doing so, the man suddenly looks like he's possessed. He starts walking away, crosses a road and a car slams directly into him. Surprisingly, the automobile is totaled but we don't see if the mystery man suffered any wounds from the accident.

Next: Constantine is in his apartment's bathroom. He spits up blood into the sink. Black sigil-type tattoos cover both of his arms.

Then we're in a doctor's office or a hospital. A medical doctor tells Constantine he has lung cancer. It's terminal. True to his form, Constantine lights up after seeing his lung x-rays.

Next: We're inside a nondescript room. Some sort of religious relic hunter is trying to sell different items to Constantine: stones from the road to Damascus, a "screeching beetle," something called "dragon's breath" that Constantine thought this guy couldn't get. The man tells Constantine "I know a guy who knows a guy" Constantine holds out a metal sceptre rod/tube thing and flame shoots out of it.

Then we're introduced to Angela Dobson (Rachel Weisz), a cop that's investigating the suicide of her twin sister, Isabel. In Angela's apartment she looks up John Constantine in the police database his arrest record, mug shots, newspaper articles about occult occurrences on the rise. As she contemplates the information, one by one, all the phones in her apartment start ringing.

Intersperced with the footage showing Angela's research, we see Constantine performing an exorcism on a possessed girl tied to a bed. As he starts the ritual the girl is thrashing about, but shortly her body goes limp. Constantine thinks he's gotten rid of demon, but as he looks closer at the girl suddenly a toothy demon face lunges out of her throat at him.

Next scene: Constantine is on street (maybe in front of the hospital?) in the rain. A big guy in shadow approaches him and asks, "Hey, buddy, you got a light?" When Constantine looks closer, the "man" turns out to be a hulking creature made out of bugs. This may be a nod to Mnemoth, an insect demon seen in Jamie Delano's run on the HELLBLAZER comic.

Next: Enter Djimon Hounsou as Papa Midnite in his pink fur-collared '70s pimp coat. He's with Constantine, maybe in Midnite's office. Constantine is worried that demons are coming into our world. Midnite says that they can use us as puppets, not doorways: "Demons stay in Hell, angels in Heaven. The great detante of the original superpowers."

In the next scene we're treated to our first look at the character of Gabriel (played by Tilda Swinton, who doesn't look as androgynous as expected.) Constantine comes across as a little whiny here, which is somewhat out of character from his comic book persona; the occultist asks the angel in human disguise what he did to get cancer. Gabriel says it's because he's smoked 30 cigarettes a day for X number of year, then she adds here final thought on his chances: "You're fucked."

Now we're back in Angela's apartment. As she prepares to leave Constantine alone and go out, we see him hold a cat's head steady between his hands, staring directly into its eyes. For a moment you're not sure if he's going to snap the cat's neck. Constantine says, "God, I hate this part."

Constantine travels to Hell by looking in the cat's eyes.

Hell is most stylized part of the footage, all red with high winds, burned-out cars and a post-apocalyptic landscape. Out of the shadows come some creepy half-headed demons with spindly legs that crawl about on all fours. They begin coming after Constantine who's come to Hell to look for Angela's dead sister, Isabel (also played by Weisz.)

Constantine finds Isabel. She has bandages around each of her wrists. The bandages start to come off in the high wind. As the demons start to close in Constantine climbs on top of a rock, reaches up and grabs the bandage from Isabel's wrist --

-- and he's back in the room just as Angela shuts the door.

A cool scene on the street follows next, with Constantine and Angela exchanging dialogue, then a huge swarm of flying demons attack them. Constantine wraps Isabel's suicide bandage around his hand (maybe doing something else, like lighting it on fire or whatever), and a blast of light emerges from his hand. The demons are shredded into bits and glowing embers.

Next: inside an office building, Angela and Constantine talk. Something grabs her and yanks the police officer backwards through the walls, crashing through offices and cubicles. There's a long tracking shot cutting horizontally across the walls and partitions of that floor as Weisz gets pulled/plows though all obstacles. Constantine gives chase. It ends with the big pull-back shot from the trailer where Constantine is framed in the hole in the outside of the building; he's at the edge and can't pursue any further, as the camera pulls back and above into the night. Angela's gone.

The holy shotgun is not seen much at all, just in Constantine's hand a couple times. Not as cool looking as one had hoped, it looks like something left over from the production of VAN HELSING.

We're then treated to a scene showing Constantine and Midnite in a room full of Midnite's collection of magical artifacts. Constantine sits in electric chair from Sing Sing (Papa says something like "Over 200 men died in that chair.") Constantine takes off his shoes and socks and then Midnite splashes vodka on floor around Constantine's feet. Constantine pulls his feet up ("It's cold"), takes a drag off bottle, then Papa lights the vodka on fire.

Next came a short but sweet scene. Constantine is inside a large room (an office building? Looks like florescent lights) full of vaguely menacing twentysomethings glaring at him. The fire sprinklers come on and, disturbingly, the water starts eating away at the workers' faces. The girl in front asks him, "Holy water?" as they dissolve.

Last sequence: a flashback showing Constantine as a young boy on a bus. Reeves provides a voiceover talking about how he's always been able to see strange things others cannot. Kid Constantine is staring at an old woman on the bus a few seats up. She turns around to look at him and her face morphs into a demonic visage. The young Constantine is taken aback, and when he looks again the old woman is gone -- because she's now behind him.

End of footage.

Next: in part two of our coverage of the CONSTANTINE movie panel we'll tell you what was said when the lights came back up. Look for quotes from Keanu Reeves, Djimon Hounsou and Vertigo group editor Karen Berger about the film.


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