Constantine fans when this series first debuted I did a review just based of the first six episodes and i've now come the the realisation that that wasn't a good thing to do. So i've taken down that review and i'm going to re-review this product only now i'm watching the whole story so I can fully judge it better and hopefully turn out a much better review so here we go with me review of Constantine: City of Demons.
The plot of this show / movie is John Constantine and his mate Chas travel to LA in a battle to save the soul of Chas's daughter. I'll admit that I don't really know this character at all so I can't say if this story fits with the character or not but I can say that as a story it's really well told altho this does kind of feel like a TV show which will make sense later on in the review and that's an issue with every CW Seed DC animated shows.
Of course reprising his role from both his solo show and from the Arrowverse is Matt Ryan as John Constantine he is joined by Damian O'Hare as Chas Chandler , Laura Bailey as Asa the Healer / Nightmare Nurse and Trish , Emily O'Brien as Renee Chandler , Rachel Kimsey as Angela , Robin Atkin Downes as Butler and Jim Meskimen as Beroul. This is a first for me because every actor i've listed is also pretty much every actor that appears in this show / movie so I didn't pick certain actors I just listed everyone.
As for what I thought about the acting in this show / movie it's honestly not as bad as it could have been since the acting in this thing could have been really bad. Of course Matt Ryan is great as John he pretty much owns the role of this character much like how Kevin Conroy owns the role of Batman in animation. The rest of the cast I feel do a good job and since a few of them are really good voice actors that's not a surprise but they all fail when compared to Matt.
The animation for this show / movie was done by Digital eMation and I can't really find what else they've worked on outside of Young Justice: Outsiders and Johnny Test. I can say that the animation in this show / movie was honestly really good and of a higher quality then any web series that i've seen. There is a downside tho and that is that the animation doesn't do a good job of helping the the tone and mood that the show / film is going for.
Now as you may have noticed that several times in this review i've been calling this thing a show / movie and well that's because while this thing did in fact start airing as a show on The CW Seed about a year after it's fifth episode a film version was released that had the back episodes edited in to finish the story. Why CW chose to do this not once but three times is beyond me because if you recall they released three shows each lasting around two seasons and then they would release them as a movie with new animation and that to me makes no sense why didn't they just release all of the episodes instead of releasing a few and then making us wait a year to see the rest.
In all honesty the only show that did this right was Vixen since that show aired both of it's seasons before releasing the movie version and both of those stories at least told two whole separate stories. The other two tho didn't and that got really frustrating because you'd just be getting into a show and they would end it on a huge cliffhanger and that meant we had to wait around a year sometimes a little bit longer to find out what happens next.
Now on the show's Wikipedia page they have this listed as a spin off of the Justice League Dark film all because it's Matt Ryan playing Constantine. If that's the case then the live action show and every show in the Arrowverse is a spin off this show because in my opinion this show isn't a spin off since it's set in the world of the CW DC shows and not in the world of the current DC Animated Movies and that makes all the difference.
Like both Vixen and Freedom Fighters there's new footage added into this and unlike the other two where it's mostly bridging the gap between seasons here the new footage is literally the rest of the season. Which again makes me wonder why they chose to release the second part of this show as a movie since it would have most likely have been finished when episode one came out so they could have just released the whole series there and then but nope they chose to make us wait a year.
I know I keep on going on about waiting a whole year to see how it ends but it's really did annoy me since a few of those shows were honestly really good and the fact that they didn't just release the whole thing at once was just frustrating.This show / movie does something good tho and that's give us plenty of awesome kills yeah i;m not kidding there's a lot of kills in this movie and you see them all and there so freaking cool and awesome that it makes me wonder why the whole thing wasn't like those kills.
There's plenty of action to be found in this show / movie as well and it's all wonderfully animated and wonderfully done. The issue I have with the action is that it's al magic based and that for me while being very well done just isn't that interesting to see and I know this is going to sound odd given what im reviewing but it didn't seem real to me like I like my powerless heroes to fight with there fists and yes I do count Constantine as a powerless hero.
Overall this wasn't a bad show / movie it also wasn't that great of one either if your a fan of the character then chances are you'll like this alot but for me it gets a 6 out of 10.