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Well, y'see, I'm not entirely sure there was the potential for a great Hellblazer movie, in the sense of one which caught the original character perfectly. He's a great character, but the time when John Constantine really shone was when he was a bitpart in someone else's show. He works very well as a kind of inverted version of the Mentor, the Obiwan role - always hinting, never completely helping, always on the make. Then he got his own title and fought the Damnation Army and took on Football Holligan Monsters and so on - very 80s-specific. More and more, however, he suffered from what I tend to think of as Hannibal Lecter Syndrome.
Lecter is the unquestionable centre of Thomas Harris' FBI series. His essential characteristic is that he knows. He is also fundamentally complete. There's no way he can learn or evolve, because he has achieved a kind of perfect awfulness. He's the Obiwan of serial killers; he trains and advises Starling and Graham, and other less friendly characters. Which is what makes him a lousy central character. 'Hannibal' depends in part on the idea that Lecter is in danger. You don't believe it, and you're right not to. [Spoiler for 'Hannibal'] Even when Lecter is chained up with man-eating pigs, he is still sufficiently in control of the situation to begin the process of manipulating someone to save him. By the time Starling arrives, Lecter has effectively saved himself. [End spoiler]
Constantine is much the same. He simply could not die - and more to the point, as long as he was prepared to do more and more ghastly things, he couldn't lose either. All right, his victories were often Pyrrhic in the extreme. But he won. And the thing is, although at first we felt his pain at what he had to do, we increasingly just waited for his spectacular betrayal-as-love which would clinch the game. It's articulated at one point - someone says something along the lines of "You're just waiting for something horrible to happen so that you can do something unthinkable and win".
A character like that is a secondary. You give them an apprentice, and they steal the film. That's great, as long as you give the apprentice some cool stuff to do too, like destroying the Death Star, beating Agent Smith one handed, or catching Buffalo Bill. But try to put the Master in the role of hero, and you're in trouble - you get the second Matrix movie, where the fights are boring because you don't believe Neo can lose in any meaningful way.
I'm actually quite relieved that the Constantine ethos from the comic won't be driving the film. I don't think I want a huge box office movie which pushes the idea that the best - the only - way to win against things which scare you and have terrible consequences is to become more terrible than they are. I'm not sure that's an idea I want floating around right now.
Constantine wins by going nuclear every single time. Let's not, eh?
I think there's a chance that this will be an enjoyable film. It might even be interesting. And in no way does it prevent anyone else from making film-noir with magic - which is what Hellblazer is at heart. |
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