Constantine

Existence precedes essence, but in the case of Francis Lawrence’s Constantine (2005), style precedes substance. This is not entirely a criticism; it is merely the atmospheric condition of the film, a noir-drenched comic book adaptation that smells of sulfur and expensive cologne. Watching it two decades later, one is struck by how desperately the film wants to matter, and how frequently it trips over its own trench coat. Yet, within its erratic pacing and CGI-laden exorcisms, there lies a surprisingly cogent study of the existential crisis. John Constantine is not a hero. He is a man trapped in the ultimate state of Bad Faith, trying to hustle the Almighty in a gig economy of the soul.

To understand John Constantine—played with a beautiful, wooden exhaustion by Keanu Reeves—we must look at him not as an exorcist, but as a bureaucrat of the supernatural. Sartre told us that man is condemned to be free, but Constantine is doing everything in his power to deny that freedom. He believes he is already defined: he is a suicide survivor, a man with a spot reserved in Hell, walking on borrowed time. He views his existence as a closed loop. This is his fundamental lie. He spends the majority of the film deporting demons back to the underworld, not out of moral fortitude, but as a transaction. He is collecting frequent flyer miles for a flight to Heaven that has already been canceled.

This is the definition of Bad Faith. Constantine acts as though he is an object, a tool, a thing with a specific function (demon hunter) determined by a higher power. He denies his own agency by pretending his actions are merely a necessity to pay a debt. He tells Tilda Swinton’s Gabriel—an androgynous embodiment of divine arrogance—that he should be saved because of what he does. Gabriel rightly sneers at him. Salvation, in this universe, requires a leap of authenticity, whereas John is merely offering a bribe. He treats God like a corrupt landlord he’s trying to pay off with manual labor.

The film is at its most compelling when it focuses on the physical "Nausea" of existence. Constantine is dying of lung cancer. The film does not shy away from the grotesque materiality of this. The coughing, the black tar, the sweat—these are reminders that we are trapped in decaying biological machines. For an existentialist, the body is the "facticity" we must contend with. Constantine’s chain-smoking is a defiant embrace of his mortality, yet he is terrified of the nothingness (or rather, the Hellish something-ness) that comes after. He is a man who has seen the truth behind the curtain—that the universe is a wager between God and Lucifer—and found it not majestic, but irritatingly bureaucratic.

The aesthetic of the film mirrors this spiritual exhaustion. It is slick, jagged, and occasionally silly. The demons look like skinned rabbits, and the Holy Shotgun is a fetish object for an adolescent power fantasy. However, the film stumbles into profundity during its climax.

Faced with the impossibility of winning, John finally exercises radical freedom. He slits his wrists. On the surface, it is a repetition of his original sin (suicide). But the context transforms the act. He does not kill himself to escape; he kills himself to barter for the soul of another. For the first time, he acts without the guarantee of personal gain. He accepts the consequences. He chooses Hell to save Isabel. In that nanosecond of self-sacrifice, he becomes authentic. He creates his essence.

The film’s ultimate joke—and its most Sartrean twist—is the reaction of Lucifer (played with delight by Peter Stormare). Lucifer, unwilling to let John win a moral victory and ascend to Heaven, cures John’s cancer and physically drags him back to Earth.

Here lies the supreme absurdity. John Constantine is saved, but his punishment is life. He is forced back into the crushing responsibility of existence. He is condemned to live, condemned to choose, condemned to wake up every morning in Los Angeles and decide who to be. The film ends not with a triumph, but with a reprieve. He quits smoking, a small, humorous nod to the fact that he must now take care of the vessel he is trapped in.

Constantine is a flawed artifact, often weighed down by the heavy-handed angst of the mid-2000s. It lacks the intellectual rigor to fully explore the theological horror it suggests. And yet, in its portrait of a man trying to negotiate a plea deal with the void, it captures a very modern, very human anxiety. We are all John Constantine, insisting that we are victims of circumstance, checking boxes and following rules, hoping that if we just look busy enough, the universe won't notice we are making it up as we go along.