as to suggest a shot sequence decided by dart board) and a final act that has the grace of a tumble off a ladder, Constantine suffers from either a failure of vision or a rush to finish. More, for all the talk of hellfire and the consequences of faith, Constantine looks and feels a lot like bubble gum. It's slick, facile entertainment that falls back on jumbled mythology whenever a plot point is necessary and short-changes character development in favour of now-familiar digital trickery. (At one point, Constantine pauses at a broken-out window of a high rise, and the urge to yell "Jump, Neo!" is irresistible.) Chewed-up and swallowed, the film seems to constantly be a minute behind the cool stuff--lowering hopes, again, that Neil Gaiman's important "Sandman"all been sublimated in their tomato/tomahto pronunciations of "Constantine" and the many passive-aggressive mentions of the character's Americanization.

Falling under the umbrella of "Behind the Story," fourteen featurettes--"Conjuring Constantine" (16 mins.), "Director Confessional" (6 mins.), "Collision with Evil" (5 mins.), "Holy Relics" (8 mins.), "Hellscape" (12 mins.), "Visualizing Vermin" (10 mins.), "Warriors Wings" (3 mins.), "Unholy Abduction" (6 mins.), "Constantine Cosmology" (5 mins.), "Foresight: The Power of Pre-Visualization" (14 mins.), and "A Writer's Vision" (2 mins.)--totalling 89 minutes comprise the bulk of the video-based supplementals. In the unintentional laughs department, we have producer Lauren Shuler-Donner saying, "I think Keanu has a lot going on inside and I believe that John Constantine has the same thing," and Keanu himself speculating in his trademark zen deadpan, "It must have been interesting