CONSTANTINE: CITY OF DEMONS (2018)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

While watching DEMONS I had no idea it was a compilation of the episodes of an animated web series. The episodes seem just as seamless as if the movie had been conceived as a continuous DTV movie.

DEMONS is also a loose adaptation of the graphic novel HELLBLAZER: ALL HIS ENGINES, but the script by Marc DeMatteis takes the straightforward story by Mike Carey and adds various unnecessary complications.

This was the first animated film featuring Constantine (voiced by Matt Ryan, who played the live-action character in a 2014 TV show) in solo action, as opposed to his previous ensemble action in JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK. For that reason DeMatteis may have felt himself justified in interpolating aspects of the character's origins. Thus, after Constantine is contacted by his old mate Chas to save Chas's little daughter Trish from a mystic coma, a support-character relates how Constantine and Chas both experienced "the Newcastle incident." This forces the script to focus more on Constantine's past deeds than his current quest to liberate the little girl, as well as various other victims of the coma-spell (only briefly referenced in DEMONS).

As in the graphic novel, Constantine and Chas journey to Los Angeles to meet the demon behind the spell, and as in the novel, it's a corpulent demon, Beroul, whom the two men can't attack because the evil entity has the spirit of Trish inside him. Beroul blackmails Constantine into becoming Beroul's enforcer, to knock off his demon-competition. In due time the malcontent magician figures out how to summon the Aztec death-god Mictlantecuthli in order to destroy the demons-- though this still leaves him with the problem of how to liberate the spirit of Trish from Beroul's gullet.

DeMatteis, apparently drawing on a few lines in ENGINES where Constantine expresses discomfort in the City of Angels, adds a new player: Angela, the "collective consciousness" of the entire city. This spirit takes on the form of a sexy babe and tries to get jiggy with the hero to convert him to her cause-- which, rather redundantly, also involves getting rid of Beroul's competition. This duplication of motive proves inferior to Carey's original scenario, in which Beroul makes common cause with Mictlantecuthli, and it also has the effect of diminishing the mythic presence of the death-god, who is implicitly tied into the "collective consciousness" of L.A.'s Hispanic people, some of whom shared bloodlines with the Aztecs. Since the death-god is played down, DeMatteis also elides the ENGINES character Melosa, who is not an Aztec cultist but is loosely tied to such contemporaneous descendants.

The most unnecessary addition, though, is that Beroul is not really Beroul, but a mask for Constantine's old enemy Nergal, the devil who was involved in the Newcastle incident. In the comics this entity is a recurring menace, but here he's vanquished in roughly the same way that Beroul is in ENGINES, purely for the sake of tying the Los Angeles caper into Constantine's origin narrative. In addition, although the innocent Trish is saved, DEMONS gives both Chas and Constantine a much more downbeat conclusion to their heroic endeavor.

Though I found Angela unnecessary, as are a crew of "Constantine mini-me's" that appear in response to her spell, I still rate the film's mythicity as "fair" because of the depictions of the operations of occult magic, both those original to the screenplay and those derived from the graphic novel. I note in passing that DeMatteis' humorous moments are inferior to those of Carey. The animation is, like most of the stuff produced by the DCAU, well-done, with some harsher violence than usual when Beroul shows Constantine some of his "home movies."