Constantine

DIRECTED BY Francis Lawrence
STARRING Keanu Reeves, Rachel Weisz, Shia LaBeouf, Gavin Rossdale

“Originally, the studio thought the movie should be like Men In Black,” says director Francis Lawrence prior to screening for Blender some freshly edited suite sequences from his horror-thriller Constantine. “But we went a darker way.”

He can say that again. The footage finds star Keanu Reeves messing around with an electric chair, visiting an unpleasant-looking hell and vomiting blood. The reason for the latter is that Reeves’s character, supernatural investigator and chain smoker John Constantine, has lung cancer. This is doubly unfortunate given that the morally ambiguous Constantine already knows he’s headed for an eternity in the place where heated blankets are not required. As the Archangel Gabriel informs him, Constantine is “fucked” and, says Lawrence, the film deals with his desperate attempts to reverse that situation.

“There were moments when the studio was, like, ‘Does the hero have to be dying of lung cancer?’ ” says Lawrence, a first-time director previously responsible for numerous music videos including Aerosmith’s “Jaded.” “A lot of what is unique to this movie was scary for them at first. But now they’ve really embraced it.”

Constantine was originally a blond, grizzled Brit, who first appeared in the pages of the comic book Swamp Thing before graduating to his own title, Hellraiser. And some comic fans have been less than pleased with his Hollywood metamorphosis into the fresh-faced American Reeves. One was even moved to post on the Ain’t It Cool News film website that the project proved that Warners, the studio responsible, “fucking sucks monkey tits.”

Unsurprisingly, Lawrence takes a different view. “I understand why it pisses them off,” he says. “But the comic fans who have seen the footage really don’t think it’s a sell-out, like other comic-book films have been.”

Certainly, the finished scenes are impressive: part Matrix, part Exorcist, and with enough spectacular effects to justify what Lawrence admits is a “close to $100-million” price tag. In any case, the director can’t be blamed for all of the changes in the character, particularly the fact that he smokes a made-up brand of cigarettes, Chang Jiangs, instead of the U.K. brand Silk Cut.

“Yeah, we didn’t try to get any kind of product-placement deal on that,” he says. “Imagine the pitch: ‘Hey, wouldn’t you like this guy who’s dying of lung cancer to be seen smoking your brand?’ I don’t think anyone would have jumped at the opportunity.”