Constantine: The House of Mystery (2022)

DC Showcase Animated Shorts:

Constantine: The House of Mystery (2022)

Dir. Matt Peters

C: THoM is a kind of epilogue to the Justice League Dark: Apokolips War (2020) movie, showing what happened to John Constantine after he made his fateful decision therein. [1]

He's now in the House of Mystery and, as is normal for the magic user, his luck is mostly bad. But he's not alone. Many of his friends are there, too. That's good, right? Right?

The story is a 'time reset' scenario, wherein we witness the same starting event more than once, but it moves at a speedy pace and there's a welcome level of dark humour throughout that helps it not feel repetitive.

If he's to escape the cycle, he'll need to use his cunning and his cynicism yet again.

Matt Ryan reprises the role. The honed level of wry wit in his portrayal works better for me in animation than it did in live action.

The story 'borrows' an event from Garth Ennis' run on the Hellblazer comic, which works in context but means we'll probably now never see that arc brought to the screen in full.

It ends on a cliff-hanger. It'd be a perfect opportunity to kickstart a full Constantine animated series from, but that's as likely as heavy snow in Cairo.

A word on the short running time: it runs just shy of 27 mins (that's including opening and closing credits). It's clearly labelled as being part of DC's Showcase: Animated Shorts, so I expected that, but the 76 mins runtime quoted on the back of the box is cheekily misleading. The disc includes three additional shorts. That 76 mins is the combined runtime of all four.

The others are Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth! (2021), Dir.  Matt Peters | 18 mins;  The Losers (2021), Dir. Milo Neuman | 15 mins; and Blue Beetle (2021), Dir. Milo Neuman | 15 mins, all of which had been previously released. Constantine's section is the only new one. That sucks if you own the other discs, but is great if you don't. Completists will feel short-changed, though.

See THIS PAGE for more info on the Showcase: Animated Shorts.

[1] It'll be helpful, therefore, to have seen Apokolips War beforehand - which is itself the 'end' of the DCAMU movie continuity that began with The Flashpoint Paradox (2013), so to get the full story you'll need to go back that far. That's a lot to ask of a viewer, especially as some of what falls between the two mentioned movies isn't even worth watching, imo.

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