Mark Goes to the Movies

Constantine (dir. Francis Lawrence) Well, The Matrix it ain't, though Keanu gives his trademark Perpetually Puzzled Performance, the special f/x are pretty good, and the location scout looked hard to find the scuzziest block in L.A.'s skid row for the setting. Face it, this one is based on a comic book, not Thomas Aquinas, so the theology operates at the level of The Exorcist. But in the Matrix tradition, it does feature a colorful African-diasporan character (there Gloria Foster as The Oracle, here Djimon Hounsou as a quasi-Jamaican Earth-plane/Hell-plane mediator), plus Tilda Swinton as an angel-then-a-devil-then-an-angel (nice wings on those angels!) and Gavin Rossdale as an evil but very dapper half-human/half-demon. And I'll 'fess up: any movie with this many close-ups of Rachel Weisz is a-okay by me. Mark's rating (stupid points): ???