Constantine

Hmmnn. You may recall that I tried to be fair and said

For all I know, Constantine will be a pretty good movie for folks who don't know anything about the comic. The trailer has some cool eye candy in it. My trailer-dar makes me suspect bad writing, but it could be wrong. So a fun movie is plausible.

I'm trying to resist a fanboyish response ...

and for a minute there, I thought this might turn out to be true. Andrew O'Hehir of Salon quite liked it, duly noting

I can understand why Hellblazer fans are upset about this movie. John Constantine was invented 20 years ago by hallowed comics genius Alan Moore in his Swamp Thing series, and his fictional history is well defined
...
Reeves' Constantine is an entirely different character, a sardonic L.A. noir hero who lives alone in a gigantic loft with all his supernatural trickeries and a boatload of old-school Catholic guilt. I wouldn't argue that he's a better character, but he works.

and then arguing

It's genuinely too bad that comics fans couldn't be made happy too, but Constantine, in this dark season, is a reason for action-movie fans to give thanks

But I don't entirely trust Mr. O'Hehir. He's pretty good, but I've seen him miss the mark.

A. O. Scott of the New York Times didn't like it one bit, calling it an

overblown, overlong attempt --- which falls just short of success --- to make a movie dumber than Van Helsing.

but he often doesn't take to genre movies that I enjoy, so that's not necessarily completely damning.

So I trundle on over to Roger Ebert, who generally has a good nose for genre movies, and he gives the movie a star and a half out of four and then just starts MST3000-ing details from the movie.

Oh, and the plot also involves the Spear of Destiny, which is the spear that killed Christ, and which has been missing since World War II, which seems to open a window to the possibility of Nazi villains, but no.

So I don't know what to think. Rotten Tomatoes is reading almost exactly half fresh, half rotten.

At least he does smoke cigarettes.