Animated Movie Review: Constantine - City of Demons

Constantine: City of Demons [2018/2019]

So just like Freedom Fighters: The Ray, CW realized that splitting a story intended to be viewed as a movie up into five-minute episodes is kind of a stupid thing, so they decided to instead wait until the whole movie-season is done with before actually releasing it as a compilation movie. 

And Constantine: City of Demons adapts the rough storyline of Hellblazer: All His Engines, with a couple of large changes to incorporate some more characters, change the specifics of the assholishness that Constantine does, as well as combine the storyline with that of the Newcastle Incident, by making the supposed big bad of All His Engines, the fat demon Beroul, as an alternate identity assumed by Nergal.

I've reviewed the first "season" of this movie but I'll basically go through it. Viewed as the first act of the movie, it honestly feels pretty inconsistent, shoehorning Asa the Night Nurse into the story with her really not doing much other than provide exposition and help to protect Chas's daughter. The flashback works a lot better with the revelation that it's not just there to go "oh Constantine has to save another little girl from a demon", but with the revelation that in this version of the story, Beroul is Nergal, who wants to bring a little bit of hell into the human world. It's honestly as ridiculous as it is in the comics, but the depictions of gore and brutality in the movie ends up making the whole fast food chain comparisons look more disturbing than laughable. 

There was this whole extended sequence of Nergal hosting a bunch of demons that engage in surprisingly graphic torture, murder and implied rape, which went on for a bit too long for my liking. Despite Asa's inclusion in the story, I'm pretty happy that the show didn't devolve into basically another action-packed Justice League Dark storyline and still focuses on Constantine and Chas, and after an encounter with a bunch of random hell hounds (which feels like a remnant from when the movie was conceptualized as multiple five-minute episodes) they meet Angela, the shape-shifting personification of Los Angeles, in something out of American Gods or something, before Constantine eventually has the idea of seeking the help of a forgotten Aztec death god, Mictlantecuhtli. 

Tricking Beroul/Nergal's competition into an abandoned church, sealing it with holy water and then allowing Mictlantecuhtli to kill them all is pretty fun, and in a departure from All His Engines, Constantine decides to kill Mictlantecuhlti right here and now. Of course, the revelation is that Nergal and Angela are both working together, so Constantine and Chas end up making a plan to trick both of them by... pretending to open the gates of hell and unleashing even more competition to kill Nergal. And then there's some bizarre, sappy scene of Constantine using a spell to channel love into the part of Tricia's soul to blow up Nergal's body? That felt genuinely out of place in a Constantine story, and looking at how it was done in the book (Constantine tricks Mictlantecuhtli to restoring Tricia's body and causes her to be restored and burst out of Beroul's body), it honestly feels tonally out of place. 

Constantine also decides to sever his ties with Nergal, sending him back to hell even if with the temptation of possibly saving Astra... but then reveals to Chas that apparently the curse he used to defeat Nergal comes with a price -- the "love" is utterly spent, and apparently Chas ends up forgetting his family and vice versa. The specifics of these Kingdom Hearts style "everyone forgets who you are" plotlines have always been hit-and-miss, but it's a neat, bittersweet ending of Constantine simultaneously rescuing the lives of people, while also causing some horrifying after-effects into their lives. It's still pretty optimistic with Chas being taken in by Angela as one of the many lost souls who can seek a second chance in Los Angeles. 

Ultimately, though, this is... a weird movie. It adapts a pretty fun standalone story while also conflating it with one of Constantine's more iconic villains, but it takes place outside of both of the original NBC series continuity as well as the CW series? It's not hard to honestly handwave this as just being another of the adventures John Constantine goes on, though, and the slight inconsistencies with the Astra bit could be shrugged off. It's a fun, well-told little story, and while there are some parts of the story changes that I don't really agree with (Asa in particular really felt shoehorned in), it's still a pretty solid watch.