TV Review: Constantine, Series Premiere (by Guest Blogger Eric Farwell)

As part of Halloweek, I've enlisted my friend Eric Farwell to be a guest blogger.  In addition to being a talented actor, writer and stand-up comic, Eric is also an aficionado of literature, film, comic books, music... everything this blog is about.  Please enjoy his first entry below --Dave

John Constantine debuted as a comic book character in a mythic, spectacular fashion that would be difficult for any team of creative artists to follow, much less improve upon. The brainchild of Alan Moore, Constantine appeared suddenly in the beloved ‘80s run of Swamp Thing. 

He instantly upstaged the slogging, beleaguered lug. Clearly, this British mystery figure had power and connections, but he also had an attitude. One of the first things he said to Swampy was, “I’m a nasty piece of work. Ask anybody.” The line revealed so much about the man, in so economical a fashion, it was stolen by the producers to be spoken by the current screen incarnation on the NBC series

 Back in the day, he was a breath of smoky grey air in a comic about lily-white innocents grappling with pure, black evil. The hair-raising stories were well-served by the inclusion of a bleakly funny antihero with the nerve to order Swampy around. It’s been tempting to dismiss John Constantine as a character who works best as a supporting figure, since his chance to be a leading man in comics, Hellblazer, has never lived up to Alan Moore’s run with the character. But then, maybe nobody ever had the same feel for John.  Moore once expressed antipathy for what other writers had done with Constantine. In a rare instance of praise, for Brian Azzarello’s faithful rendering in Hellblazer: Hard Time, Alan wrote that Constantine was coming for the other writers, but he’d tell John to leave Brian alone.

One wonders what John would do if he got ahold of Keanu Reaves. The less said about the feature version of Constantine the better. What hurt the most was that the script and director were decent, forever tantalizing us with nagging fantasies of what might have been if they’d had a fine actor from the British Isles.

                Now properly cast with Welsh actor Matt Ryan, Constantine looks and sounds like Constantine. England is well-represented at the start with an asylum in the town of Ravenscar, and though the action relocates to Atlanta, the atmosphere is appropriately creepy throughout the episode. David Goyer and Daniel Cerone have adapted this with obvious love for the source material. DC continuity abounds, teasing us with easter eggs that promise appearances of such characters as Dr.Fate and Baron Winters. Two veterans of Lost, Harold Perrineau and Jeremy Davies, lend good supporting bemusement in their roles as an angel and a doomed geek. It’s no spoiler, by the way, to refer to the geek as doomed. He doesn’t die in the pilot, but Davies’s character spends his entire screen time feeling doomed… and people around Constantine, it is explained, have a history of dying. Although there’s not much outright terror, the potential is there for this series to seriously jolt us one of these days. Our antihero’s greatest failure is allowing an innocent nine-year-old girl to be damned to Hell, so that raises the back-of-the-neck hairs. In the meantime, Ryan delivers sardonic dialogue with panache. So much about this is right.

                But.

                Without being slavishly devoted to the comic, one still must miss some of what made John Constantine stand out from the rest of the wizarding crowd at DC, at Marvel, indeed… from the crowd of fictional mages the world over. You’d never hear the original John say in the narration, “I’m an exorcist.” In fact, when he narrates in the comic pages, it’s much more a reflective stream-of-consciousness, with stinging asides to himself. Having him describe his own personality the way the producers must have pitched his character to NBC is a teensy bit distracting. That kind of narration works for the immature Flash over on the CW, not so much here. It’s also off the mark to have Constantine chanting Latin spells. It was refreshing, in the early days of the comic book, to see him simply make things happen while lighting his talismanic cigarettes. Yes, yes, it’s perfectly understandable that he’s not a chain-smoker here, knowing what we know about insidious tobacco marketing. But the cigs are missed. Perhaps they could have given him some other bit of quirky business to replace the spell-casting that is so typical of every wizard from Dr. Strange to Harry Potter.

                As this is another entry in the age of TV antiheroes, it’s disappointing that they’ve removed some of the “anti” from the “hero.” It’s hard to imagine this version of John doing some of the casually perverse nasties that his graphic version has done, not just to the demonic… but to the living. He once caused dozens of convicts to die, just so he could get out of prison. And in a later storyline, the douche publicly snogged a floozy while taunting two old ladies nearby.

                Alan Moore has famously withheld his name from credits in Hollywood versions of his works, such as Watchmen. He’s real persnickety like that. He probably wouldn’t have cared for the electrical demon in the pilot, turning power lines into snake-like hazards. It would behoove Goyer and Cerone to look closely at what Moore did to make the earliest exploits of Constantine so riveting. For not only was John understated… the hideous threats that he battled were understated as well… until they were so close… they were already under your skin.