Summer is here and what better way to celebrate than with blood, brits, and banshees. That’s right, in this special one-shot review, unless the CW Seed releases more episodes, I’m going to be taking a gander at all five episodes – the equivalent of one 28 min episode – of the pseudo-sequel series to Constantine, Constantine: City of Demons. I’ll explain what I mean by pseudo-sequel farther down the page. Beware, some spoilers are ahead.
1. Teenage Lobotomy
For those of you who are looking for the Constantine of Arrow or Legends, you’re looking in the wrong place. While it retains Matt Ryan as the voice of Constantine, the tone is decidedly darker and much more horror oriented.
The first thing you’ll notice when watching Constantine: City of Demons is that the show is not shying away from the blood and gore. On-camera shots of John stepping on and squishing red-blooded demons and people getting their heads chopped off are part of the norm, making this much more tonally faithful to the comics than the original NBC show. Heck, we see a pool of bodies, with the room they’re in being filled with a red, bloody mist.
This was the right move and it helps to set City of Demons apart from the other superhero shows on TV right now. Does that make it good? Well…I’ll get into that but it does show that superhero TV (or movies) don’t have to all be the same genre nor do they have to be on the tame end of TV-14 ala the original NBC Constantine.
Just to put it on the record, I loved that show. I was crushed when, not only was its season cut to thirteen episodes, but it was cancelled, preventing any form of resolution to the plot nor to his, Chas and Zed’s character arcs. I bring this up because, as I alluded to in the intro, this was billed (originally) as a continuation of the Constantine character. This is not the case.
The word of god here is that this takes place in the Justice League Dark universe and, as such, is neither attached to the original show (ignore what IMDB has to say) nor to the Arrowverse version, who may or may not be the same Constantine. I’m not sure on that one. I was genuinely hoping this would be a continuation because, as far as I know, there hasn’t been a single mention of the NBC show’s plot in the Arrowverse. This was the perfect opportunity to tell a new tale while reinvesting people in a darker version of the show that people already liked. Instead, we got this tonally great but all-around poorer version of the live action show.
I’m not bitter.
2. I Wanna Be Sedated
I don’t want to knock Warner Animation too much but they have been putting out some lifeless cartoons during the last few years. Not on TV, their TV work has been pretty solid, but every animated project with this style, i.e. most of their recent direct-to-video animated movies and the Vixen shorts, has had the same stiff models, stilted animation, and disinterested faces.
It’s also too shiny. For a series that is supposed to be horrific and grungy, that isn’t reflected within the visuals of the series. Characters are almost always perfectly lit, the digital compositing of the backgrounds and characters separates them onto different, equally flat planes, which is noticeable anytime a character moves, and the horror is undercut by lazy effects. There are moments in the Newcastle party, when the demon is murdering the partygoers, where the severed heads look like someone dragged a photo across another photo in photoshop while filming it and then put in some stock blood-squibs to add to the gore. Hell, they’re even in LA and it feels no different to London save for a bit less fog and a bit more cars. There should be a palpable difference between locations.
Maybe this is a function of the budget or the creative decisions but whatever they are, it reflects poorly on the series and served to be a major distraction through the show.
3. Endless Exposition
Looking at my notes, I have more lines where I just write the word “exposition” down multiple times than any other note. This is a 28-minute episode y’all! And exposition isn’t a bad thing when done right. Here it is not done right. John Constantine continually narrates to himself aloud, as if he had thought captions around him, and 80% of the time the visuals conveyed his thoughts better than he did.
Continued belowIt’s totally unnecessary. The idea seems to be that this is for those who are unfamiliar with the character, a fair and reasonable decision, but there are better ways of conveying the same information. Show Constantine doing magic and then being a shithead without having to have him and other exposit about how much of a magically shithead Constantine is. Nightmare Nurse is another good example.
She’s a lesser known DC character who would need an introduction. Most of her intro is good but then she says, “So, what do you want from the Nightmare Nurse?” It’s an unnatural line. Laura Bailey tries her best to make it less forced but not even she can make it work.
4. Too Tough to Die
Matt Ryan has become Constantine. There is no question about it. He’s a natural and that naturality extends to his voice-work with the character. While the other CW live-action heroes’ transition to voice acting were…let’s say, less than stellar, Matt didn’t lose any of the charm or snark of Constantine. He did lose everything else because the animation fails to capture the energy of his live-action counterpart but I digress.
5. Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Remember how I said this was five “episodes” in one? This format simultaneously manages to be poorly integrated as well as narratively unsatisfying. The constant cuts at where each “episode” ends seem arbitrary, making the viewing experience much less smooth than it should be. Additionally, since the “episodes” have been bundled together already, there is an expectation of some form of resolution. There is none, with the end of the episode (the full one) being an abrupt cut just as the series was starting to get good.
There is no narrative lead in to this being the end of an episode, no sense that it’s coming to a close. As such, the episode leaves me flummoxed instead of desiring more. The dedication of one whole “episode” to Newcastle as well gives the impression that this is going to wrap up in some way by the end. The pacing does not fit what we have so far. Were they to have left this as five separate episodes on the site, I may have been more forgiving here, as five episodes out of however many are planned is very different from one, piecemeal mess.
Will there actually be more episodes? Maybe but dropping one piecemeal episode without even so much as a “to be continued” is frustrating to say the least. What the CW should have done was waited until they had completed an arc, something with a satisfying conclusion, and then released the episodes however they wanted instead of this partial series what-have-you.
As anyone in comics can tell you, the format matters.
OK, no banshees, but two out of three ain’t bad. Thank you all for tuning in. If and when we get more episodes, I’ll be sure to check back in with you all. Until then, check out our other Summer TV binges (like my Babylon 5 series) and be sure to let me know what you thought of Constantine: City of Demons.
