Rented “Constantine” last night. Was hoping for a fun, flashy popcorn movie with a cool gothy theme (demons and angels, impending armageddon, and so on). Instead we were treated to a boring barrage of oversimplified Catholic theology and pointless plot twists that weren’t particularly twisty but very plodding.

So there’s this guy, John Constantine, who can see stuff that other people can’t. Turns out there are semi-angels and -daemons that walk among us (”half-breeds”), and God and Satan are embarked on a detente game of influence with our souls as the prize. There’s rules to the game, and Constantine has established himself as the enforcer for those daemons who cross the line. Apparently he tried to kill himself because of his terrible visions (imagine seeing the undead on the bus every morning), and was dead for a couple of minutes before he was revived. But because he “took a life” (his own, although he’s not dead, so wrap your brain around that logic), he’s damned to hell for all eternity. Constantine hopes that if he does enough good stuff (i.e. blow bad guys back into the Pit where they came from) he’ll earn enough Elysian brownie points to put himself back in the good graces of the Almighty.

As you can imagine, the folks down below aren’t a big fan of John’s, and as Lou (wait for it….Lou….Lou….Lucifer!) points out to John when he pays him a visit: “We’ve got a whole theme park waiting for you, John”. And John’s got lung cancer, after smoking a pack a day since he was fifteen. Blah blah blah…we can all see where this is going.

Oh yeah, someone also happened to find the “Spear of Destiny” (the one that the Roman soldier pierced Jesus’ side with), wrapped in a Nazi flag in an abandoned church in Mexico, and the now-posessed guy is walking north on his way to Los Angeles (could the movie be set anywhere else than the City of Angels? No, of course not.) When he gets there, something bad is gonna happen.

All of this makes me say “Thank God I’m not a Catholic”. Not that this represents except in the most debased ways the teachings of the Catholic faith as I understand it, but I’m sure that for a lot of folks who see and read this kind of stuff they think “that’s why I hate religion…all of these arbitrary rules about who goes to heaven and hell”. The focus on hell and punishment that a lot of folks seem to go on about is truly macabre and sadomasochistic, but that seems to be the emphasis, if not the point of their religion. Our proper response to God is fear and trembling, because if we don’t mind our P’s and Q’s the Old Man in the sky is gonna send us down to the Old Man in the Ground, where we’ll be “torn apart again and again for all eternity” as the movie reminds us.

Where is the mercy of God in all of this? Where is the God that identifies so strongly with us that he suffered and still suffers with us? Where is the possibility of transformation, of repentance (that is, “metanoia”, or literally, to think again), of grace?

I’d say avoid this movie. There’s little in the way of entertainment here, and a lot to dislike.