TO HELL AND BACK

REVIEWED - CONSTANTINE: Keanu Reeves is a film noir exorcist in this pretentious, silly comic book fantasy, writes Donald Clarke

WHAT are the odds on coming across two films in one week featuring that pointy weapon - the Spear of Destiny, it says here - used by a Roman legionary to pierce the side of the dying Jesus? It's almost enough to make you believe the universe is divinely ordered.

Constantine and The Passion of the Christ, a new, very slightly defanged version of which is reviewed below, could be seen as neatly complementary pieces of work. Mel Gibson's picture uses the techniques of the horror shocker to invest a tale from the scriptures with new energy. This leaden epic tries to elevate raw hokum by infusing it with theological mumbo-jumbo and intimations of the Apocalypse.

You might argue that the director, some pop-video nonentity, should be commended for demonstrating a weird sort of integrity. The picture never stoops to pointless, banal action sequences - though there are some - when there is an opportunity to indulge in pointless, banal dialogue concerning the consequences for our universe if the eighth Seal of Demetrios were to fall into the hands of Xenophon the Betrayer (or some such guff).

Freely adapted from the enjoyable DC comic that gave our own Garth Ennis his big break, Constantine offers up the exorcist as a tortured noir anti-hero: loosened black tie, uncorked bottle of bourbon, Zippo constantly firing up another fag. In the comic book, John Constantine was a blonde cockney; in the movies he is played by the version of Keanu Reeves - brow furrowed as if trying to spell an eight-letter word - that saves the planet rather than the one that strums air-guitar and eats surf.

When a Mexican gentleman finds the sacred spear we discussed earlier, the uneasy equilibrium between heaven and hell is destroyed and a reluctant Constantine, assisted by police officer Rachel Weisz and her recently deceased, but still useful, twin sister, finds himself grumpily standing up for the forces of good. He's Rick Blaine. He's Sidney Carton. He's SpongeBob SquarePants.

There are some good things here. Tilda Swinton, whose delicacy and wit suggest that she thinks she's still working for Derek Jarman, is brilliantly eerie as an Angel Gabriel of uncertain gender. And Peter Stormare, the ham's ham, makes an amusingly glib satanic emissary. But, these pleasures aside, Constantine comes across as a wad of pulp with ambitions above its humble intellectual station.

Selected prints of Constantine will be accompanied by Ian Power's beautifully made Irish short, The Wonderful Story of Kelvin Kind. Featuring a pleasant leading performance by Bern Deegan and good support from Keith McErlean and Doreen Keogh, the picture moves around a busily surreal word - echoes of late Jacques Tati, perhaps - to tell the story of a socially maladroit man's attempts to charm his pretty new neighbour.