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As Plato, William Blake, The Matrix, and now Constantine remind us, appearances can be deceiving. Or as the title "supernatural detective" in the latter film puts it, "Hell and Heaven are here on earth; just look behind every door, every wall . . . " Although such apocalyptic thinking might work wonders for our nation’s foreign policy, it doesn’t always translate into great movies. Playing a variation on his Eno in The Matrix trilogy, Keanu Reeves is hard-boiled and cancer-ridden (those damn cigarettes) as John Constantine. A conglomeration of the superhero in Van Helsing, the tortured priest in The Exorcist, and the haunted little boy in The Sixth Sense, he works as a kind of referee in the Jobian wager between God and Satan over all the souls on earth. I’ll say no more about the premise except that as first-time director Francis Lawrence leaks more and more exposition (this an adaptation of the DC/Vertigo comic-book series Hellblazer), the film makes less and less sense. More striking than the story are the images. A Mexican peasant crosses the border with "the Spear of Destiny" and a herd of cattle fall dead at his approach. Androgynous, nattily attired demonic/human "half-breeds" promote evil on earth. Constantine visits Hell to find the soul of Isabel (Rachel Weisz, also playing Isabel’s twin, Angela), a suicide. Anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-euthanasia, Constantine seems to share more of the right wing’s agenda than just an apocalyptic point of view. (121 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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