Article first published as CONSTANTINE Review on Seat42F.
FOX
has Gotham, ABC has Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agent Carter,
the CW has Arrow and The Flash, and now NBC has CONSTANTINE. It’s
getting very crowded for superheroes on the television airwaves. And
those are just the ones directly based on the comic books, as Sleepy
Hollow, Grimm, and others could be considered in this genre, too. How
does the latest, inspired by a DC character spun off of Swamp Thing
twenty-some years ago under the comic title Hellblazer, stack up with
its competition?
Well, for starters,
CONSTANTINE has a different tone than most of its peers. While other DC
series have gone to dark places after the success of Christopher Nolan’s
Batman films, CONSTANTINE is a horror title, so it necessarily doesn’t
have a lot of fun in its DNA. The world is shadowy and washed out, and
the titular character and his friends, what few of them he has, all
struggle with their inner demons as much as the literal ones invading
the world.
John Constantine (Matt
Ryan, Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior, Layer Cake) begins the series in
an institution. Once mired in the supernatural world, he has distanced
himself from all that junk and tried to clean up his life. We soon learn
this is because he feels responsible for something that happened to a
little girl awhile back, but whatever his reasons are, he’s out of the
business and working on bettering himself.
However,
just because Constantine is done with demons and such doesn’t mean they
are done with him. After all, the show isn’t called Demon Hunter Rehab.
So Constantine is forced out of hiding when a threat comes to town that
requires his unique skill set. Will he continue to resist, or step up
and be the hero that the world needs him to be? Take a wild guess.
Constantine
isn’t alone, of course. An angel named Manny (Harold Perrineau, Lost,
Sons of Anarchy) is assigned to watch over him, much as Constantine is
given the task of protecting Liv (Lucy Griffiths, True Blood), a young
woman whose father he knew. Constantine’s best bud, Chas (Charles
Halford, True Detective), lends a hand and a taxi, and while not a main
character, a reluctant Ritchie Simpson (Jeremy Davies, Lost, Justified)
is roped into joining the gang, at least temporarily.
What
unfolds is not a standard procedural tale, but rather, an involved
narrative that is both scary and dire. I could compare CONSTANTINE to
shows like Grimm, Hannibal, Dominion, Arrow, Gotham, and more because it
borrows from all of those in tone and style, though isn’t a carbon copy
of any of them, either. CONSTANTINE stakes out its own piece of the
landscape, and it does manage to feel somewhat unique.
I
can’t say it’s among my favorite programs, though, at least not from
the pilot alone. It’s not that the pacing is slow, because a lot
happens, but I still felt my attention wandering. It’s a bit boring,
perhaps because it puts bringing the fright ahead of making one care
about the characters, even as it doesn’t commit fully to an action
piece. It’s pretty consistent and decently enough made, but just doesn’t
grab me the way others have. And it won’t help DC unseat Marvel as
Comic-to-Screen King anytime soon.
I
will say, CONSTANTINE isn’t really predictable. One of the characters
mentioned in this review (not Simpson) isn’t sticking around, at least
not full-time. They are neatly written out of the story, kind of making
them feel like they’re in a case-of-the-week guest star situation, but
with a role that is developed more than most, as if intended to be a
main character, then dropped. There is a replacement coming to the story
soon, which may change my overall opinion of the show, depending on how
the dynamic could shift. So the jury remains out, for now.
CONSTANTINE premieres Friday, October 24th on NBC.
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