‘Constantine’ needs work but has promise
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Even if “Constantine” doesn’t last more than a couple of weeks on NBC, it’s still better than the 2005 feature film with Keanu Reeves also based on the Hellblazer comic books.
As comic book TV shows go, “Constantine” is promising, but it’s difficult to say more than that, with just one episode to go on. There’s good stuff in the pilot – the special effects, for one – and not so good stuff, leaving the question up in the air about whether writers David Goyer and Daniel Cerone, who developed the series, can make the fixes necessary to do justice to Hellblazer. I liked the earlier version of the pilot and hoped to be able to see if the promise paid off in both the final version and subsequent episodes. Unfortunately, NBC only sent one episode out, which doesn’t communicate much faith in the show.
Premiering at 10 p.m. Friday, “Constantine” begins with its titular antihero, John Constantine (Matt Ryan), checking himself into a mental hospital for electroshock therapy as a way of trying to forget what he’s seen in his work as an exorcist.
Wandering around, he encounters a young woman with white eyes, in a room crawling with cockroaches. She’s writing something on the wall which turns out to be the words “Liv Die.”
The game’s afoot, as it were, and Constantine heads to Atlanta where he shows up just in time to rescue Liv Aberdeen (Lucy Griffiths) from being swallowed by a sink hole.
The special effects are legitimately cool, even if the character writing is often flat and uninspired. We get to see Constantine’s guardian angel, Manny (Harold Perrineau) sprout wings, Constantine’s companion and driver Chas Chandler (Charles Halford) get zapped by a severed power line that suddenly turns into a kind of electrified snake, and a demon get destroyed in a pillar of fire.
The concept of the show is a comic book, but as we’ve seen in better shows such as “Arrow” and “Gotham,” solid writing can make anything believable. If Cerone and Goyer need an example of how to make this work well, they need only look to NBC’s Friday hit, “Grimm,” whose fourth season will be the lead-in for “Constantine.”